Towards the Next Generation of E-Learning Standards: SCORM for Service-Oriented Environments

An important research topic in the field of e-Learning platform architectures focuses on service orientation. Although service-oriented architectures (SOAs) are well-understood in the field of software engineering, the e-Learning community has started only recently to discuss SOAs for e-Learning. This paper takes a closer look at the implications of service orientation on SCORM, because this new type of e-Learning platform architecture offers a different way of reusing content and functionalities. SCORM is widely accepted by e- Learning manufacturers to establish a distributed learning environment model that fosters the interoperability of learning tools and course content. It is near at hand to use the SCORM approach also for service-oriented e-Learning environments. However, as is shown in this paper, several improvements have to be executed to specify a SCORM version for a SOA.