WordPress MU

Based on the interest we have seen online, we at scorm.com are working on a wordpress/wpmu plugin that will allow a site to host SCORM (1.2 & 2004 4th ED) content with minimal effort. This could turn your MU installation into a basic training delivery system complete with tracking and reporting via our SCORM Cloud offering. The SCORM Cloud is our great Rustici Software SCORM Engine running in a secure environment on Amazon's cloud architecture.

We have a few questions we would like to ask the community:

1.) Does anyone want this in their Wordpress site?

2.) If this sounds cool, then would it be best to let each blog user manage their own courses, or should that happen from a global aspect? Either? Both?

3.) Currently the plugin features a widget that shows the logged in user their electives/assignments... are there more user interface hooks we are missing? (we are not wp experts by any means)

4.) Course Registrations are only for logged in users for your site currently. Is this good, or should there be some type of open access to the content? For sites using membership plugins, would we hook into those users instead?

Any input you guys have can only make this a better product for the community, so let's have it.

-Brian
scorm.com

I would welcome something like this. We have been wanting to integrate an LMS into our existing WordPressMU community.

We plan to allow users to purchase access to courses. I'm not sure what you mean by "manage their own courses." Can you provide a better explanation? We may also offer some free courses. It will only be the site administrators that create new courses and control them. All students will be our regular WordPressMU members.

Students should be able to see their history. We would like to make their history of completed courses part of their public profile too if possible.

We are using BuddyPress on WordPressMU for our current community and don't charge people to join the community. We aren't using any other type of membership plugin.

When do you expect to have a plugin ready for testing? I look forward to talking to you about this!

Heya Brian,

We'd be interested - for http://edublogs.org users especially :)

Alternatively we could co-author with http://wpmudevorg.wordpress.com ?

Feel free to get in touch with me directly at james (at) edublogs /dot/ org

Cheers, James

I have wanted to integrate learning tools into wpmu since version 1.0

Questions
1. Yes please.
2. Both. A friend is setting up a system where each teacher has a wpmu blog for their class with the main blog being the front page and another having Buddypress. So giving each blog admin the ability to create courses would work best there. I use it with young learners and do most of the site admin for my teachers, so a central system would be best for that.
3. Make sure it works with Buddypress, especially with the groups. I can see a lot of people using Buddypress as a central communication hub, and the ability of teachers and other students to find their course links, etc. in their profile or group (class) would be great.
4. If courses could be partially open to non-members I can see that this could be useful to someone who wants to allow users to view parts of real courses in order to drive them to signing up (or paying in the case of a business).

I would love to test this out from a users / administrator point of view so as soon as you are ready to release a beta or whatever post a link.

Not a huge fan of SCORM and so a bit ambivalent about it's inclusion in wordpress, but if you ARE going to do this, can I suggest that there is a massive need for a php-based solution/library that can render scorm to be slotted into any number of content frameworks, and so if you are going to develop what sounds like in essence a php-rendering engine for SCORM, to do so in a way that is more re-usable (e.g. not too WPmU-specific). There is a lot of content locked in LMS that could be liberated into any number of open source platforms if a siple PHP solution existed for previewing it. Also, can I suggest that by-and-large IMS CP is a better target - the AICC tracking stuff in SCORM seems largely irrelevant unless you are actually proposing to track user interactions with this in WP. My $0.02. I wouldn't say 'no' if this was available.

Thanks for the responses guys. We currently have a basic wordpress plugin working now that ties our 'appid' (the identifier that tells us who _owns_ a course and the resulting registraitons) to a blog. We are working toward branching this to be a full WPMU plugin that could have a single 'appid' that owns all the courses, but lets the blog admins manage the courses at a global level (with basic security restrictions).

Today, you could (with a very rough UI) import a SCORM (package from within WP to the SCORM Cloud and share that content with existing users on your WP site. It is very basic, but could be ready to release as a beta plugin in the coming months.

Read more about our service here: SCORM Cloud

Thanks again for the interest and we'll keep everyone posted on the progress.

@brianrogers

I assume you are aware that WP and WPMU will merge in the upcoming 3.0 release. Not sure if that would create additional challenges for the development or not.

I too want to add testing/certification functionality to a WordPress blog soon. I can duplicate all aspects on an online course now except for testing.

I'm interested in using scorm modules in the LMS I've been developing for my ESL website (making it as a plugin). Currently I have multiple choice or true false quizzes with integrated gradebook (and I really like how it is working so far)
I was curious about importing modules, but this sounds like something linked to not a real plugin. Am I right?

lostdeviant

What are you using for your gradebook? Is it a plugin or something you wrote for yourself?

For SCORM modules I have been testing Xerte Online Toolkit and then using an iframe embed plugin to embed the SCORM into the page. Seems to work well so far. It doesn't look so great with the standard setup, but otherwise seems okay. Haven't had time to look at how to get the output to a grade book though. Have a look.

Yes please.