92 Building Interactivity through SCORM with Meghan Cotter – 12.01.2017

In the December 1, 2017 Active Teaching Lab, Meghan Cotter shared how to connect interactive activities to Canvas.

SCORM, or “Sharable Content Object Reference Model,” is a set of technical standards so digital tools play well together. It’s needed for online tools such as Articulate Storyline and Adobe Captivate to connect to the Canvas gradebook. 

Takeaways

• Articulate with SCORM can track that students go through all content pages, whether linear or branching.
• SCORM can be set such that students need to simply “complete” content (ungraded, click-through assignments) or “pass” an assessment (graded).
• Because SCORM assignments are Assignments and not Quizzes, students can retake them. This can be a problem if they go back and retake an assignment for practice; the latest grade is saved. A workaround for instructors is to end access to the graded assignment and open a copy as an ungraded one.
• Use the Canvas Test Student to run through assignments several times (all correct, part correct, none correct).
• Articulate Storyline doesn’t work well with the Canvas Mobile App (yet), though it does work on the Articulate App (if stored outside of Canvas — e.g. WordPress). This option cannot be graded in Canvas.
• SCORM only plays well with upgraded WordPress accounts.
• A drawback of building content in a third-party tool like Articulate is that it must be reloaded whenever updates are made.
• Use an outside web page as a Page in Canvas by inserting it as an iframe. To make the iframe full-screen, remove ?preview= from the code and try a width of 100% and a height of 6000 pixels.

Check out the session’s activity sheet for more information.

Active Teaching Labs are held Fridays from 8:30-9:45am (and every other Thursday from 1-2pm, see events calendar for dates) in room 120, Middleton Building. Check out upcoming labs or read recaps from past labs. To stay informed about upcoming Labs, sign up for regular announcements by sending an email to join-activeteaching@lists.wisc.edu.

Watch Meghan’s Story here and follow along with her slides: