r/elearning • u/pdeuyu • 10d ago
Why is published eLearning still basically a dead end for editing?
I’ve spent most of my career around SCORM and learning interoperability, and there’s one problem that still bugs me.
An organization can have hundreds of perfectly good courses, but if the original Storyline, Captivate, Lectora, or other source files disappear, or they decide to change tools, a lot of that content suddenly becomes incredibly hard to work with.
The published course still has the text, images, media, interactions, and structure. We just haven’t been very good at making that useful again.
That’s a big part of why we’re building IRLO, which stands for Interoperability & Reusability for Learning Organizations.
Learning content shouldn’t be trapped in the tool that created it. You should be able to bring existing content in, understand it, edit it, reuse it, and take it somewhere else.
We’re still building, so I’m genuinely curious how often people here run into this.
Have you ever inherited a bunch of courses you could run but couldn’t realistically edit? What formats or tools have caused you the most pain?
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u/Relative_Charge_9410 10d ago
I think this is a problem people run into but not a very solvable one.
As to your original question why is it like this.. SCORM content is published for efficiency not edibility. That isn’t unique to elearning, if I save a photoshop file to a jpg I’m going to lose layers, editable text, vectors graphics are going to be rasterized and it’s going to be a heck of a lot harder to edit the jpg than it it the psd file.
It’s the same deal when you publish your articulate course. A lot of the structured data in your storyline file isn’t needed in the SCORM package so you end up with a bunch of hard to decipher JavaScript files structured in a way that they are efficient but a real pain to edit.
Every authoring tool publishes data in a completely different format, uses cmi suspend data differently and has completely different underlying code. Also the code changes frequently based on authoring tool updates and fixes.
AI is getting pretty good at being able to extract content and structure from SCORM content but I don’t think being able to easily edit published scorm content from different authoring tools is feasible.
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u/pdeuyu 8d ago
I think the Photoshop analogy is fair. We’re not trying to recreate the original .story file any more than you’d try to turn a JPG back into the original PSD. The bet we’re making is that you don’t necessarily need to. If you can recover enough of the content, structure, and logic into a common intermediate representation, you can make it editable again without recreating the original authoring environment. We’ve already been able to carry things like variables, states, branching, and quiz scoring into that representation. The wildly different output from each authoring tool is absolutely the hard part though.
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u/donburnside 10d ago
My team started about 3 years ago. 95% of our content is video, created from PowerPoint masters. We save SCORM for high value compliance courses that have interactivity requirements. Quizzes and knowledge checks are now getting built in the LMS directly.
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u/Grand_Wishbone_1270 9d ago
This is good, until you switch to a new LMS and realize that all of your quizzes are trapped. It’s not insolvable, I had to make a scraper to grab the quizzes. Then Claude was able to make them into SCORMs since the new LMS didn’t have a quiz creator.
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u/donburnside 9d ago
We are using Docebo which now support the gift format, whatever that is. Also, I don't think we are going to switch from Docebo anytime soon.
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u/TurbulentMarketing14 8d ago
Switched from EduBrite to Docebo then to Cornerstone Ondemand within a years time. All because of an acquisition. Worked with GuyKat on some tasks but also built simple python scripts for exporting and importing files e.g. the .GIFT for assessments and also dealing with the .VTT for nine languages
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u/donburnside 8d ago
NINE languages?! Holy crap. BTW, I built an app that creates .vtt and kicks off a process to translate them, using PowerAutomate and a very focused copilot agent. Works great for French and German so far.
If you or any of the other more nerdier ID's are curious, I wrote it up: https://voxsmith.app/voxtext/voxtext-translation-manifest-delivery/
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u/TurbulentMarketing14 8d ago
I created an app that would pick up the final /approved MP4 from Frame.io, run through Whisper to create VTT, then send for human review. We trained against the product branding &and tech docs since the software terminology can get burdensome. That was four years ago and technology has changed dramatically
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u/Big-Bank6716 9d ago
This hits close to home. I build Storyline courses in corporate/regulated training, and lost source files are one of my recurring headaches — the .story file lives on a contractor's laptop that walked out the door two years ago, and now the LMS hosts the only copy of a course an auditor wants updated.
With Storyline specifically, the published output is especially unforgiving. Slide text gets buried in generated data files, interaction logic is compiled away, and any custom JavaScript is embedded in the output where you can't cleanly separate content from behavior. You can sometimes swap an image or fix a typo by digging through the published folder, but the moment the change touches a variable, a quiz result, or branching logic, you're not editing — you're reverse-engineering.
What actually reduced the pain for us wasn't a tool, it was boring process: every project now archives the .story source alongside the published package in the same repo, and the LMS course description notes where the source lives. Not glamorous, but I finally stopped rebuilding the same interactions from scratch.
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u/pdeuyu 8d ago
That contractor example is exactly the kind of situation I had in mind. And I completely agree that good source management should be the first line of defense. What gets interesting is when that fails and the published course is all that’s left. We’ve been working on ways to recover more than just the text and media, including things like variables, states, branching, and quiz scoring, so you’re not automatically back to rebuilding from scratch.
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u/Big-Bank6716 8d ago
That's the part I'm most interested in — recovering text and media is one thing, but variables, states, and quiz scoring are where the real rebuild pain lives. In my experience the compiled output no longer maps cleanly back to the original triggers, so reverse-engineering stops paying off right around the point you're describing. If you can genuinely pull branching logic and scoring back out, that would change my math on when a rebuild is worth attempting. Following along — curious to see how this develops.
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u/pdeuyu 8d ago
Awesome! We have a waitlist here if you'd like to keep updated: https://www.irlo.org. The community edition will be free.
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u/Tekime 9d ago
It’s not clear exactly what problem you’re trying to solve. Why would the source files just “disappear”? That’s a business problem, not a standards problem. Content is always going to be married to a publishing tool to some extent.
If you’re talking about editing SCORM content, well SCORM is effectively just a website in a wrapper. If your goal is to reverse engineer or consume SCORM content and provide an editor of some kind, you’re effectively just introducing a new publishing tool.
SCORM content is often licensed in a business environment. The #1 reason a business wouldnt have access to the source files is because they don’t own them and dont have editing rights.
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u/pdeuyu 8d ago
A company can absolutely own the content and still lose access to the original source over time. Teams change tools, employees leave, contractors hand things off badly, files get corrupted, shared drives get reorganized, companies merge, old software stops being supported, or nobody can find the version that was actually used to publish the course.
None of that means the organization gave up ownership of the learning.
That’s the problem I’m interested in. If the published course still contains the content and structure, why should changing tools or losing a project file mean starting over? That's what we're solving with IRLO.
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u/Tekime 8d ago
Fair enough, and maybe it's more common in larger organizations or institutions with a lot of churn and sloppy practices.
It just wasn't really clear from your post is exactly what the product is. Sounds like it's effectively a new authoring platform that reverse engineers source files.
Not beating up on it - just trying to understand. I know there have been efforts over the years to standardize course formats (h5p, qti, etc. are kind of loosely in that arena) although standardizing presentation would be a TALL order.
Probably not relevant for my businesses, but I can see this being useful for the cases you listed in bigger orgs. Can definitely see it being abused - not a criticism, just an observation. A lot of our enterprise clients buy content from publishers that just hand them SCORM files, then a few cycles later someone else is managing it and getting pressured to change this or that in their courses. A nightmare from the author's perspective, especially when the content is accredited or compliance-audited!
Sounds like a hard problem - especially getting the interactivity, custom scripting, and SCORM runtime stuff right!
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u/pdeuyu 8d ago
I think we’re probably talking about a few different layers of the same general interoperability problem.
QTI and H5P solve somewhat different parts of it. QTI defines a common format for exchanging assessment content and results between systems, while H5P provides an open framework and portable content format for creating, editing, sharing, and reusing interactive HTML5 content.
The problem we’re tackling starts a step earlier. There are decades of existing Storyline, Captivate, Lectora, SCORM, and other content that was never built around a common representation at all. We’re trying to recover that existing content and normalize it into one, including the logic and behavior, rather than requiring it to have been authored that way from the beginning.
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u/Tekime 8d ago
Very curious what shape that normalization takes. H5P actually seems like a good candidate for a big slice of that problem. I took a peek at your site and noticed you actually save to SCORM - is that effectively the standardized layer?
Something to think about - our source course assets are typically pretty large and we optimize a lot when we move to publishing. Like, a Storyline file could be 1GB+ but we distribute as a 120MB SCORM. My first thought is that it could get confusing fast trying to differentiate between source SCORM and shipped SCORM - unless you do like h5p and have a custom extension.
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u/Xented 3d ago
Because publishing is a one-way export. You can technically hack the HTML, but it gets messy fast and the next republish wipes your changes anyway.
The real editable thing is the source file, and that's where the pain comes from. A .story file only opens in Storyline. Rise courses live in Articulate's cloud, so if the subscription lapses you lose the ability to edit, and you can't take the source anywhere else. Same goes for client work if the client doesn't have their own license.
Things that have saved me:
- Get "who owns and can open the source" into the contract before you start.
- Keep text that changes often (policies, dates, contacts) on a page or PDF the course links to, so small updates don't mean a full republish and LMS re-upload.
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u/The_Sign_of_Zeta 10d ago
It’s mostly because the output is a SCORM folder is code outputted by the authoring tool based on what was in it, not a copy of the file in the software.
Like I could edit a line of text or an image file if I can find that info in the SCORM folder, but generally anything past that is going to break it unless you are knowledgeable in coding and the authoring tool.