I’ll prefix this with: I don’t much about SCORM.
I’m the maintainer for a training video delivery platform. It shows videos but doesn’t test users. Clients of the company can download SCORM modules (that is a zip) which contains a link to the video on our server.
Some clients are now asking for reporting so that they know their LMS users finish watching a video. At the moment, they just know if the user loads the module but nothing else.
As for working out if the current user has watched the film, I can do that. It’s just a bit of javascript to interact with the video player. Fine.
But how do I communicate that event back to the LMS? Do I post it to their server? How do I know where it is? What if it’s behind a firewall? Do they poll my server? In both cases how do I identify a user from the LMS in a way that when the results go back, they line up in the LMS?
What is the standard way of a learning management system finding out the completion status of an external module like ours?
The SCORM API is what you’re looking for. It enables active communication of completion status (among many other things) between the SCO (your module) and the LMS.
At runtime, a discovery algorithm (written in JS) is used to locate the API handle, which is just a JS Object. You, as the content developer, work with that API handle, and it does all the client-server communication, so you don’t have to. 🙂
You can find a technical overview of how to locate and use the SCORM API here.
I’m more of the “learn by example” type, so I’d also recommend downloading one of Rustici’s golf (pause) courses. Check out their Basic Run-Time Calls Course to see how they are accessing and interacting with the SCORM API. They’ll be doing exactly what you’re looking to do.
The official SCORM docs can be found on adlnet.gov, and they have an entire book dedicated to the RTE, but I doubt you’ll need to dive that deep.
Good Luck!