Last week, I attended the IEEE Learning Standards Technology Committee (LSTC) meeting in Alexandria, VA. There are at least a couple topics discussed at the meeting I'd like to cover. I'm starting in reverse order in this post since I'm covering a topic discussed on the last day of the three-day meeting.

On that third day, Chris Guin of BBN joined us to review the "SCORM RTE Web Services Interface." This was developed as part of an "Integrated Prototype Architecture" funded by Joint ADL Co-Lab beginning in 2006. A paper describing this work was submitted in 2008 in response to LETSI's call for papers on requirements for a successor to the current-day SCORM standards. As the paper describes, the web services interface follows "as closely as possible" the SCORM ECMAScript Interface for Content to Runtime Services Communication (IEEE 1484.11.2-2003).

A key difference between the two versions of the same interface is that while the ECMAScript API facilitates communications to an LMS from a Sharable Content Object (SCO) delivered within web client, the SOAP-based Web Services interface allows any application to act as an SCO. Thus, the web services version opens up the opportunity to use SCORM for integrations where content is delivered within a specialized simulation or game application rather than just a browser.