On the distributed management of SCORM-compliant course contents

Since the emergence of the SCORM specification, e-learning has received more and more attentions in recent years. It plays the key-enabling role in knowledge management for individual, schools, and enterprises. The most salient features of SCORM come from its goal, namely, reusability, accessibility, interoperability, and durability. One of the underlying mechanisms realizing the goal is metadata. However, dealing with complex metadata efficiently in a LMS is a tedious task for system developers. By cohering to interoperability SCORM-compliant course contents can run on different SCORM run-time environments, nevertheless, distributed LMSs could not communicate to each other; this hiders the content management and sharing. In this paper, we propose a hybrid scheme composed of an XML binding model and a LDAP-based directory service to overcome these two shortcomings. A preliminary experiment demonstrates its efficiency and effectiveness toward distributed management of SCORM-compliant course contents.