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Report of the
SCORM/NSDL Technical Meeting
Alexandria, Virginia
May 18, 2004

1. Background

This is the report of the meeting on May 18, 2004 to discuss opportunities for technical collaboration between the NSF's National Science Digital Library (NSDL) and the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative's Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM).

The reason for holding this meeting was the observation that the NSF's National Science Digital Library (NSDL) and the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) Initiative’s Sharable Content Object Reference Model (SCORM) program are two federal funded initiatives that have potential for collaboration. Both are currently studying the next phases in their technical evolution.

1.1 SCORM and CORDRA

ADL's emphasis is on learning materials, in contexts where there are strong incentives to follow models for structuring and organizing resources with prescribed standards that enable interoperability across delivery systems and enable content reuse. SCORM is therefore a richly defined standard tailored for a specific category of material that is being applied across all levels of education and training [SCORM].

ADL has recently begun a new initiative, known as CORDRA (Content Object Repository Discovery and Registry Architecture), to facilitate discovery and reuse of SCORM content objects [CORDRA].

1.2 NSDL

The NSDL is a broad-based program that encompasses all levels of education in all scientific disciplines. Its particular emphasis is on information discovery: helping students and teachers find resources. As such, it takes a very broad view of what constitutes an educational resource. However, the NSDL has found that many independent collections are willing to follow simple guidelines for structuring and organizing resources [NSDL]. An example is the Open Archives Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI).

The NSDL has recently decided to expand its object model and repository interfaces using concepts from the Fedora system [Fedora] and web services interfaces between components.