Description of IHRDC’s Stub Courses

Since 2004, IHRDC has offered SCORM courses that are hosted on regional world wide servers. These courses allow administrators to have the most up-to-date content on their systems without having to go through the trouble of making image, video and text re-uploads on a quarterly basis. We call these stub based courses.

The learning system uploads these stub courses as a zip file, but only uploads the portion that communicates with the learning management system (LMS) as well as required manifest files. The effective server size is of the course package is around 21kb. All course and SCORM file functionality updates happen from IHRDC’s regional servers.

SCORM courses communicate with an LMS by using javascript and a set of predefined calls that are required to take place. This communication happens in a file that is included in the course package called learningunit.htm. This file also captures the learner’s completion by an encrypted querystring of SCORM completion runtime calls and redirects that the LMS. Essentially the communication between IHRDC courses and a LMS is a combination of full duplex and half duplex.