No evidence? I don't believe that is true at all. Perhaps it is because I come from the development end of the eLearning spectrum.

Just to clarify... The "benefit" of such specifications are not simply to "improve" learning. We'll leave that to the instructional designers, not the features of any given specification. The benefit here is protecting your investment.

It appears when certain individuals bash the viability of SCORM in the eLearning space, it is due to their lack of real world exposure to developing courseware for a multitude of large corporate clients. Roughly 95% of the courseware we are continually developing for clients are based in SCORM, the rest? AICC. All of which eventually reside in a SCORM/AICC conformant LMS. There are a *ton* of different LMS packages out there, and we support them all. How? Not by reinventing the wheel every time we develop courseware, I can tell you that much. Add to this the fact that we have *huge* clients that change their LMS from time to time, and instead of having to ditch their investment in the current course offerings, or do a communication "re-wrap" job on 100's or 1000's of courses, they can simply reupload them into the new LMS. No extra cost. Does this mean the learning approach in such courseware is poor or degraded due to adopting this specification? Certainly not.

Due to the fact that none of our clients typically have subject matter that makes sense outside of the context of a specific course object, we generally don't have the problems that many are "concerned" with. Since a SCO can mean "any" granularity of information, one could break down their content into pieces of information that could retain context across several modules. We've not come across a valid need to do so very often.

There is certainly a place for such specifications. They are used daily, and they are a vital piece to the whole equation. I dread looking back on the days when they didn't exist. A vast majority of the training groups within the largest corporations around the world have adopted SCORM, at least version 1.2.

I do agree, however, that the specification should not have been boasted an influx of downloadable/purchasable SCO's. I never really saw this happening, but it's a neat idea. This industry is still in its infancy though, so it isn't entirely out of the realm of possibility.