Broadly speaking Opus creates learning resources at the level of the individual learning portions called Sharable Content Objects or SCOs.
Opus does not create courses. A course will be defined within the Learning Management System (LMS) or Learning Content Management System (LCMS) and your Opus publication will be imported to the relevant course from within the LMS.
To let the LMS know what is in the Opus lesson and how it should be used, your publication is put into a SCORM-conformant package with a manifest which specifies the content in a particular way required by the SCORM specification. Opus lets you build that content package during the publish process and you can even specify your own IDs for the various elements if you prefer.
Opus now includes the key SCORM functions as standard Opus actions making ti easy to create SCORM packages to youre specific requirements.
Any SCO which is SCORM-compliant must send a specific command to start communication with the LMS and another to end it.
These commands are issued by actions on the first and last pages in the SCORM template created when you start a new SCORM publication in Opus.
Important Note:
It is a key part of the SCORM specification that these commands must only be issued once. For this reason you should ensure that your publication visits these pages only once.
For Example:
If you want your user to restart the publication (because they failed a test for example) you should ensure that the publication resets back to a different page than the first one created for SCORM otherwise the LMS initialisation call will be made again and cause an error. We would suggest that the first page is a simple welcome page with a title graphic on it and the main start page follows that.
Advanced users may like to note that the commands for setting up communication with the LMS are located in the HTML wrapper which launches the Opus publication and not the publication itself.
In addition to the basic initialisation and finish functions these provide an opportunity for you to write your own communication with the LMS and we have provided some basic examples to get you started.
Note:
The names used for data by SCORM v1.2 and SCORM 2004 are slightly different so you should note that we have provided duplicate commands in both formats. You should use the double forward slash (//) to comment out those you do not need and remove the forward slashes from those you do. Do not mix versions as it is will not work.
To communicate specific information with the LMS you use one of two key actions - GetSCORMValue and SetSCORMValue.
Note that the data models used in v1.2 of SCORM vary from those used in SCORM 2004. You will need to find out which version your chosen LMS supports. You must only use data models from one version throughout a publication.
Obviously you can change the variable names in these examples or copy and paste them to create others.
Note:
The names used for data by SCORM v1.2 and SCORM 2004 are slightly different so you should note that we have provided duplicate commands in both formats. You should use the double forward slash (//) to comment out those you do not need and remove the forward slashes from those you do. Do not mix versions as it is will not work.
To communicate specific information with the LMS you write a line of script using one of two key functions - GetLMSValue and SetLMSValue.
A list of the most commonly-used data models in each SCORM version is provided in a separate topic.
If you have problems getting your SCORM publication to work correctly you should note that Opus now automatically collects debugging information and saves it to a special variable called LMS_DEBUG. If you temporarily display this variable in your publication you will get a report of how communication with the LMS is progressing.