What a packaging standard was actually meant to solve
E-learning standards exist because organisations discovered they had bought content they could not move. Everything awkward about them follows from that original problem.
In the late nineties an organisation that bought training content discovered an unpleasant fact. The content ran inside the vendor's delivery system and could not be moved out of it. Change the delivery system and you lost the library. Buy from two vendors and you ran two systems. The content was not really yours in any practical sense, because the thing that made it work was the coupling between the material and the software that presented it, and that coupling belonged to somebody else.
The response was a set of agreements about how a package of learning content should be laid out, what file describes its contents, and how the content talks to whatever system is showing it. If everybody follows the agreement, a package built in one authoring tool can be dropped into any conforming delivery system and will run, report completion, and record a score. That is the whole ambition. It is a modest one, and it was and remains genuinely valuable, because it converts content from a rental into an asset.
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