Many thanks to Ingo Dahn of University of Koblenz for passing along this important report from European SchoolNet:

http://aspect.eun.org/node/84

According to the report:
"Before the Lisbon workshop, I had anticipated that some teachers might be enthusiastic about Common Cartridge. However, while I thought teachers would appreciate the possibility of importing a cartridge into Moodle and then moving and/or changing some parts of the resource, I was unprepared for the high level of positive reaction that we witnessed."

"In comparison [to SCORM], the teachers were very enthusiastic about Common Cartridge content packaging. After importing a CC package into Moodle, the teachers could remove parts that they did not need, edit the content and change the order of different resources (see fig. 3). Many teachers requested instructions on how to adapt Moodle to use Common Cartridge packages and some teachers expressed an interest in using Common Cartridge to package their own content in order to share it with other teachers."

These results are not surprising to me. As we have been explaining for the last several years, Common Cartridge was designed by the education sector for what the education sector does and needs in practice. So, it is not surprising to see the strong positive reception by teachers - especially versus something like SCORM which was designed for self-paced computer-based training/learning. We do believe that small SCORM objects, or SCOs, are very complementary to the Common Cartridge format - as they can be contained within a cartridge. However, the general trend in education is for these type of modules to be hosted at a provider website and not typically downloaded. But, a win-win scenario may be for such items to be available in offline SCORM packages. This is all predicated on ADL/DoD upgrading SCORM to a modern technology platform.

The report also talks about installation of content packages and how this is burdensome for teachers. We will fix this soon with an LTI-based approach for installing into the VLE. Those interested in working on this, please contact me - we possibly have some funding available to do it.

- Rob Abel