Intuto Blog

Why wasn’t SCORM there from the start?

If you don’t know what SCORM is, you are probably lucky, and unless you have a good reason to dig into it, I suggest you read below and never think of it again.

I remember the first time I heard about SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) - it was 2004 and we wanted to follow a standard when creating our new content authoring tool.  I remember feeling excited by the concept of a standard to share content between Learning Management Systems (LMS) - it made a lot of sense that we ensured our new course content followed this standard.  

I printed the hundreds of pages that made up the SCORM 2004 standard and spent the weekend trying to stay awake as I read it….

A case study in Maori language learning.

We all saw Covid-19 affecting countries overseas and we all knew that it would eventually reach New Zealand’s shores, but not many believed it would impact New Zealand’s teaching curriculum as quickly and dramatically as it did on March 23rd, when it was announced all schools were closed as at 3pm that day.

When the lockdown happened, I don’t think anybody really knew what to do.  Certainly getting close to your loved ones and staying safe was step one, but after that, how could educators help the community and parents get through the four week (at least) lock down?  

Update to the Intuto Share page
After a lot of customer feedback and discussion we have decided to move the Share page away from the course publish process.  Intuto has a number of options around sharing content including bulk upload, groups, and collections making sharing simple and elegant.  Moving the Share page improves the course publish user experience.

When we started down the path of developing Intuto as a Learning Management System (LMS) that met the specific requirements of the modern SME segment, we started with some ideas, quickly built and tested them and then, based on user feedback, modified the initial platform to meet the real needs of the market. In short, we listened to our customers and released, changed and deleted features from the core idea to meet what they wanted. This was a great approach for the first growth period of the Intuto product and led to some great feature innovation.

As we got more and more customers, we started to have some other challenges - how to manage new developments, how to keep our diverse customers happy and…...eventually speed.

Registrations into courses were growing so fast that in a single month we had the same number of new course registrations as we had had in total for the two years leading up to that month!

I have always enjoyed learning new things, especially in education, so I was very lucky to fall into the perfect role 16 years ago when I came back from my OE.  I started at a very small company with a huge vision, and I have been here ever since! Many of my colleagues from university now work in big organisations with pinball, table tennis and even slides - but I wouldn’t change my career path for anything (well maybe Craig Walker’s role) - because eLearning feels good.

The beginning

As mentioned in the previous technology post, many months ago a prototype was built to prove the most important (and clever) parts of the system.  The development of this prototype,  and the mantra for simple and fun online learning, lead the dev team to use the code name Simply Fun for this development.  

The Intuto development team has almost 40 years experience, almost all of which is in developing online learning systems (learning management systems, content management systems, course authoring tools).  Over the years we have learnt a lot, including to hate IE6, love javascript and most importantly that cool technology is no good if users can’t understand how to use it without reading a huge manual.