SCORM Experts / Practice

When not to package at all

A great deal of material is worse for being made into a module.

Packaging is appropriate when something needs to be tracked, needs to run consistently across systems, and has a defined completion. Plenty of useful material has none of those properties, and turning it into a module adds friction, adds a maintenance burden, and produces a completion record that means very little.

A reference document people consult is better as a document. A procedure people follow while doing a task is better where the task is. A short video is better as a video with a link. In each case the packaged version is slower to open, harder to update, impossible to search from outside, and produces a record that somebody clicked through it.

The pressure to package comes from the reporting side, because a module produces a number and a document does not. That is a real requirement in some contexts and a habit in many others, and it is worth distinguishing which one applies before spending a fortnight in an authoring tool.

Where the requirement genuinely is evidence that a person read and understood something, the honest form is usually a short document and a short assessment, not a lengthy module built around a small amount of content.

The honest summary is that packaging is a solution to a distribution problem, and distribution problems are rarer than they appear. Most organisations have a small number of genuinely portable, genuinely tracked courses and a large quantity of material that was packaged because packaging was the available process. Separating those two, and treating them differently, reduces the maintenance burden more than any improvement in tooling, and it makes the courses that matter easier to find among the ones that do not.