Note: This is a repost of my blog posting from Letsi.org

In training healthcare workers, there is a particular emphasis on distinguishing between individuals based on fine-grained demographic and user data: where they work, who they work for, whether they work in a patient care area or not, are they researchers, do they do "procedures", work in an operating room, and on and on. Sometimes only the individual themselves knows what to enter, and must key it in to their own profile.

Learning management systems do a good job of keeping track of this information, and we have gone to a lot of trouble to make sure ours does this well. The user data is drawn from many sources, and sometimes the only source for it is the user. Would it make sense to allow the LMS to send some of that demographic data to the SCO so it could adapt its content to the user at runtime?

There are several possible workarounds, including one that we use now: create multiple courses in the LMS, and distribute them to various audiences, or perhaps create a .NET frameset around the SCO that queries the DB for the necessary data, using the SCORM-passed user id as the key.

Wouldn't it be easier to simply get the data passed with the user id through SCORM? Then the course could adapt as required by the user's qualifications, location or other differences.

This shifts responsibilities previously located in the LMS to the SCO, but perhaps it makes sense in some situations.CO from the LMS