SCORM Test

There have been lots of good comments and discussion on the post Test SCORM Courses with an LMS : eLearning Technology. Well worth looking at some of them.

The basic issue covered in the post was how to test SCORM courses prior to loading on a given LMS (e.g., Docent, SumTotal, Saba, Learn.com, etc.).

We talked about the SCORM test suite, SCORM test wrappers, and various test tools such as Trident, Reload player (http://www.reload.ac.uk/scormplayer.html), SCORM Test Track, remote debugging using tools like WebEx, HTTP traffic tracking with tools like Firebug, and some other things. Quite a great bit of discussion and useful information. If you are interested in testing your scorm courses, probably worth a read.

But recently someone (anonymous) left comments challenging a few of my base assumptions and I'd be curious to get thoughts. They asked:

"Why is testing courseware different? Why assume that the client or someone else is supposed to provide systems for testing for courseware vendors but not say accounting systems?"

"Perhaps you can rent or lease the software? Most major LMS vendors have their own test labs, support, and professional services."

"All of them sell their LMSs."

"There are third-party companies which you can hire to test courseware against LMSs."

"Have you ever tried contacting SumTotal about what options they have available for third-party courseware testing? What did they say? How many other LMS vendors have you spoken to?"

All of these challenge the base assumption that I made which is - the LMS vendor really is not looking to work with people who are creating small amounts of courses that need to be tested on their LMS. That's my general sense having working with a variety of different LMS vendors, but maybe that's not true?

Also, I wonder how much it would take to get the LMS setup for scorm testing? Cost? Hours?

Any comments from the LMS vendors ?

Any experience out there in working with LMS vendors to do scorm tests?

Or is it pretty much that you are using scorm testing tools and then getting on the actual installation to test and debug issues?