Question
There is a tendency on clients asking on hole courses made in only 1 big SCO, have you heard about it before and have any idea why is so? My guess is clients are tired of handling troubles with scorm and LMS and wanna interact with LMS as less as posible... Do you have another explanation?
Answer
We definitely see this tendency as well... there are tons of "one big SCO" courses out there. We generally call these (listen for the ominous background music): monolithic SCOs. Truth be told, there's not much wrong with the monolithic SCO... It doesn't take advantage of some of the important tools made available to a SCORM content developer, but it's not the end of the world either.
This question, though, is about the "Why?" The offered explanation is a reasonable one, although, I think not the right one. My theory is that there are not yet tools that properly take advantage of the sequencing and navigation components of SCORM 2004. Perhaps these providers have elected to go with the monolithic SCOs because they, too, get frustrated with varied LMSs implementations. That's probably fair. Perhaps there isn't sufficient 2004 adoption to merit taking advantage of it. Perhaps, they elect to program to the least common denominator because it's more practical. (Many courses can switch between SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004 with little headache because the standards are consistent, even though not compatible.)
It is, in some sense, a "chicken and egg" kind of argument. LMSs aren't compelled to implement the advanced functionality until someone can take advantage of it (and SCORM 2004 is hard for LMS vendors). Content providers aren't compelled until there's someone who can actually use it. (Hey content vendors... there are over 100 LMS implementations running the SCORM Engine... that's a pretty big group... join us.)