Training and education organizations are evolving to enterprise resource platforms, which may require them to change learning management systems (LMSs) and move content and data to new applications and systems. This paper summarizes crucial lessons learned during the U.S. Army Defense Ammunition Center's (DAC) migration of 58 courses from their learning content management system (LCMS) and LMS to the U.S. Army LMS. The paper provides specific and actionable recommendations for others who may be moving content from one LMS to another using SCORM.
After years of cost escalation associated with the management and hosting of its LCMS and LMS and staffing a fullservice help desk, DAC decided to migrate its courses from their legacy environments to the Army LMS, operated by the Army Training Support Center. DAC allowed six months for the migration. Since the LCMS produced SCORM 1.2-conformant content, early migration testing led DAC to believe the process would be relatively simple. DAC created a three-phase plan and exported the LCMS content. However, during Army LMS deployment testing, several issues prevented the successful migration of SCORM 1.2 content. The issues resulted from a combination of ambiguity in SCORM 1.2, vendor-specific functionality in the Army LMS, and vendor-specific functionality in the LCMS. With three months remaining, DAC reformulated the plan and converted the SCORM 1.2 packages to SCORM 2004 3rd Edition using sequencing and navigation to control learners' experiences. This resolved the deployment issues and resulted in an on-time migration that directly contributed to DAC saving over $2 million in licensing and hosting costs over 5 years. DAC's lessons learned will help other organizations that are changing LMSs, deploying content to a new LMS, or determining which version of SCORM to use.