Adding SCORM packages to Open edX via SCORMCloud and LTI

For each interactive element that you want graded, you need to click on the element, click on the Properties icon (in the upper right corner of the screen), mark it as graded in the properties panel, assign a point value that will count towards the grade, and check the Report Answers checkbox.

In Publish Settings -> Project -> Start and End, set the Project End Action to “Close project” (I think it defaults to Stop project). That way the window showing the assessment will automatically close when it’s done playing.

In Publish Settings -> Project -> Quiz -> Reporting, set the Standard form to SCORM 2004, and then click the Configure button.

You can optionally give your course an identifier and title. If you skip this step, then all of your courses will have the default identifier “Captivate E-Learning Course” and it will be hard to differentiate between the different courses.

From the File menu, choose Publish… and make sure the eLearning output value is set to SCORM 2004, which you should have already set in the previous step. Click the Publish button and it will create a .zip file in the location you specified.

Create a free account at SCORMCloud.com and from the Add Content section of the dashboard, upload the .zip file that you just created.

Once the content has been uploaded, you need to create a dispatch that will be used to make it available via LTI.

If the first time, click Create New Destination.

Enter ‘Open EdX’ as the name. On subsequent times you can click Add Existing Destination and choose Open EdX. This name can really be anything – it doesn’t need to be ‘Open edX’.

From the Dispatch screen, click on the Dispatch that you just created, and under Export your dispatch, click the BLTI button

You should see a pop-up with information about the BLTI endpoint URL, key and secret key. Make a note of the URL, Key, and Secret that it displays

Login to edX Studio and go to your course, and select Settings -> Advanced Settings. For the Advanced Module List, add “lti” to enable adding LTI components to your course.

On the same Advanced Settings page, scroll down to the section entitled LTI Passports, and add a new entry in the form:
lti_id:client_key:client_secret where the client_key and client_secret are the key and secret that you got when you made the BLTI dispatch in SCORM Cloud. The LTI ID can be anything (no spaces) – it’s just an identifier that will be used when we add an individual LTI component to our edX course.

So for our last example, it would be:

[
“pictureperfect:5f82ddc4-ff27-45ab-b2ab-02fa929e9e34:MHDEcqX4HTz6ZOk6FJNpdxxxxxxxxxxxxxx”
]

Note: you need to add a new entry for each course in SCORM Cloud that you want to embed in an edX course. It’s annoying that this is an extra step required for each item. Open edX assumes that an LTI provider will have one key/secret combo for all courses, but SCORM Cloud uses a different one for each course.

Go to your course outline: Content -> Outline and navigate to where you want to add the LTI component containing your SCORM Cloud exercise/quiz. Click the New Unit button.

If you’ve enabled Advanced Components for your course, you should see the Advanced Component button appear when you add a new unit.

For LTI Application Information, you can type “SCORM Cloud” or whatever you want in this field. For LTI ID, this needs to match exactly, the LTI ID that you used in the LTI passports entry. The LTI URL for SCORM Cloud should be set to http://cloud.scorm.com/sc/blti

The Open in New Page setting should be set to True.

Make sure that you set Scored to be True and assign a weight that you want it to have on the total grade. You can also set a Display Name if you want.

Once you’ve added the component, you need to click the Preview Changes button or Publish it to your course.

Now we can login as a student and test it out. When you navigate to the page, there is a link “View resource in a new window”. Click on this button to launch the SCORM Cloud exercise in a new window.

You then take the exercise and SCORM Cloud is tracking your activity.

At the end of the exercise, it will compute a score for you, and if the score is above the threshhold to get a passing grade, then get a “Pass” grade.

This grade is sent back into edX and can be seen on the student’s Progress page. Please note that these scores don’t match because I took a screenshot of a different student.

1. Make sure that your Open edX site is at an internet address that can be reached by SCORM Cloud. This means basic auth must be disabled and if you’re using SSL, that you have a real SSL certificate, not a self-signed certificate.

2. A fix to the edX code which parses the SCORM Cloud request handle a non-standard (well, old standard) XML namespace that it uses. https://github.com/jazkarta/edx-platform/commit/ebcf93002557176102df2bf93ab79a979aaf0fba

3. A fix for edX’s validation of the oauth signature (https://github.com/edx/edx-platform/pull/5016)

We invite you to join the conversation on the edx-code mailing list about SCORM support in edX, and feel free to reach out and contact us if you are looking for professional help with edX.

Or if you want to take Open edX for a test-drive, you can get a free trial from our partner Appsembler.