Move my SCORM or xAPI course out of an LMS
SCORM was designed to make a course portable between learning management systems. It succeeded at that and failed at everything since. A SCORM package moves happily from one LMS to another and cannot leave the category at all: it is a sealed box that only opens inside a player.
The cost is quiet and large. Everything you know is inside a file nobody can search. Your best explanation of your own subject cannot be found by the people looking for exactly that explanation.
What comes out of the package
- Video and audio, as files, in the order the manifest lists them.
- Images and written content from the slides or pages.
- Captions, where the authoring tool included them - these become the transcript under each lesson rather than being thrown away.
- The running order, read from the manifest instead of guessed.
What does not come out
- Tracking. Completions, scores and attempts were held by the system that played the package, not by the package. If you need that history, export it from the old system before you switch it off - it cannot be recovered afterwards.
- Player-dependent interactivity. Drag-and-drop, branching scenarios and custom slide logic only run inside the player they were built for. Questions are rebuilt as real quizzes (Who marks my quizzes?); anything more elaborate is listed for you to decide about.
- Sequencing rules. Lock-step gating such as "you may not open lesson four until lesson three reports complete" is a rule the old player enforced. Say if you want that shape back and it gets rebuilt deliberately, rather than inherited by accident.
How it goes
- Send us the package. The zip you would upload to an LMS is exactly right. If it is played on WordPress through GrassBlade, start at Move my courses off GrassBlade and WordPress instead, because the structure lives elsewhere there. If it came out of Articulate, Move my Articulate Storyline or Rise course onto my own site has the detail that matters for those.
- We unpack and rebuild it as ordinary lessons, in order, with the video attached and the captions in place (Understand how a course is put together).
- You get a report of anything that would not carry, named rather than dropped, before you decide anything.
- You review private drafts and publish when you are ready (Add a lesson to my course).
Afterwards the difference is not subtle. The same course that no search engine could read becomes pages that answer the questions people are actually typing.
The prompt
“I have my course as a SCORM package exported from [the system it's in now]. Can you rebuild it as lessons on my own site, and what do you need from me?”
Press Copy, then paste it into your AI and fill in the [bracketed] parts. First time? Connect your AI to bernard first - a one-time setup in bernard → your site → Use your own AI.
Questions people ask
- What is actually inside a SCORM package?
- A zip file holding your media, your text and a manifest listing what plays in what order. That manifest is the useful part - it is how the running order is recovered without anyone guessing. What comes out is rebuilt as lesson drafts you approve before publishing.
- Does my learners' completion data come across?
- No. Scores, completions and time-spent were never in the package - they lived in the system that played it, or in a separate tracking store. That history stays where it is, and your new site starts with a clean record.
- What about xAPI or Tin Can packages?
- Same route. xAPI and Tin Can changed how a course reports back to a tracking store, not how the teaching is packaged, so the video, captions and running order are recovered the same way.
- Why not just upload the SCORM file to my new site and play it there?
- Because that keeps the problem. A SCORM package is a sealed box: search engines cannot read a word inside it, AI assistants cannot quote it, and you cannot edit a typo without going back to the authoring tool and republishing the whole thing. Unpacked into real pages, your teaching is findable and you can fix a line by asking.
- My package came out of Articulate. Is that different?
- Only in the details, and there is a page for it. Articulate packages carry caption files that turn straight into transcripts, which is worth knowing before you start.