LM-Light Website Launched
If you’re meticulous enough to check the posting dates on my articles, you’ll see a gap between the 28th December and today (5th January). Some of that time has been holiday. But quite a lot has also been spent in (finally) getting the LM-Light website online.
What is LM-Light? It’s a project that I’ve been working on for a year or two now to create a simpler way to have WBT courses talk to a LMS. It was born out of frustration at trying to get SCORM courses to work reliably with different LMS packages, and the confusion (or headache) resulting from reading the SCORM specifications.
All that I wanted to do was to be able to create a way for a simple course to talk to the LMS and:
- Find out if the student was authorized to view the course.
- Ask the LMS to bookmark the page.
- Tell the LMS that the student was starting a test.
- Tell the LMS what the score from the test was.
- Tell the LMS that the course was complete.
And I wanted something that was lightweight for content developers to use - not something that relied on an in-depth knowledge of JavaScript to get it working. All the other (probably really good) stuff that SCORM contains like content object sequencing is unnecessary for the applications that I’m looking at. After some head-scratching, I managed to boil it down to the use of 5 simple ”tags” - actually PHP statements/function calls.
So, does it work? The answer seems to be yes. We’ve been using it for some time now in the security awareness training courses that Cosaint provides to its customers without any major problems (we’ve had more problems with the JavaScript that some of the authoring tools use to create courses). And the Capeesh LMS - a PHP-based LMS designed from the ground up to run LM-Light courses - is now ready for Beta testing. So it was time to go public with the LM-Light specification.
Take a look at it and let me know what you think.