Courses and course formats

Tony,

Some publishers do provide SCORM/AICC content, but the industry has been slow to respond out of fear they would not be able to control theft of their IP. There is an IMS discussion group right now trying to create a standard called "Common Cartridge" I believe. I haven't looked for awhile but over the summer it seemed to stall out a bit. Moodle has a seat at the table on this discussion as does many of the bigger book publishers and other LMS vendors. You might want to ask your vendor whether their company is involved in this discussion and supports standards for electronic distribution of their content.

In this past year we have been approached by McGraw Hill, Prentice Hall and a few others looking for help in puzzling the distribution conundrum out. Their customer base are asking the same questions you are. At a minimum publishers should provide book resources for teachers in the way of PP's that can be added as course Resources and test banks that can easily be imported into Moodles Quiz module. Moodle supports importing IMS Content Package resources and some publishers provide content this way. If you are a decision maker on the purchase of a publishers content I would suggest using your influence. LMS systems have been around over 10 years now and are playing an ever increasing role in education at all levels.