Running a service area
SCORM packages, versions and validity
Importing somebody else's course, and deciding how long a completion of yours counts for.
On this page
Two things about a module that are easy to get wrong and expensive to get wrong: importing somebody else's course, and deciding how long a completion of yours counts for.
SCORM packages
Where you have bought a course from a publisher, upload the package on the module's own page. Both generations are supported — SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004 — and both land on the same enrolment, so a school sees one module list rather than two kinds of thing.
The package is extracted safely and served from this site, so it works behind a school firewall and there is no third-party sign-in. The outcome is decided on the server from what the package reports, rather than trusting the code running in the page.
A resumed package is handed back its own spelling of where somebody got to, so a course picked up on a different machine opens where it was left.
If a package misbehaves
Packages sometimes declare one version and behave like the other, which this site allows for. Where a package genuinely will not run, it is nearly always either not a SCORM package or an unusually large one. Try it yourself before publishing: a broken course found by forty schools is forty conversations.
How long a completion counts for
Set this on the module, and set it deliberately. Three choices:
| Setting | Use it for |
|---|---|
| It does not run out | Induction, orientation, anything about how a thing works. |
| A number of months | Anything with a professional refresh cycle: twelve, twenty-four, thirty-six. |
| An academic year | Statutory annual training. Safeguarding is the obvious one. |
Where a module counts for an academic year, a completion from the 1st of July onwards counts for the year about to begin. Schools do this in the summer, and read literally a refresher done on the 27th of August would be in date for four days.
Changing the validity later
A change applies to completions from then on and never backwards. The expiry is stamped on somebody's record at the moment they complete, from the module as it stood.
That is deliberate and worth understanding before you change it: deriving the expiry on reading instead would mean that shortening a validity in October retrospectively expired everybody who did exactly what was asked of them in September.
Republishing
Where the content has changed enough to need doing again — the law moved, the guidance was rewritten — issue a new version of the module and require it again. That reopens the requirement without erasing last year: everybody keeps their previous completion with its own date, and the new one sits beside it.
Do not use republishing for a typo. It asks several thousand people to sit something again.
Not what you were after?
Ask City Council in the bubble at the corner of any page, or open your help conversation in full. It is one conversation that never closes, so there is nothing to raise and no subject line to invent.