Is there a way to have just one SCORM file with multiple languages?

Hello!

My company wants to have our courses in different language translations. Is there a way to have just one course file where the user can select a language at the start of the course? Or do we really need to upload the course in separate multiple files/languages?

Hey :slight_smile:

It could be done with some manual tinkering with the SCO files but not something I can advise on.

Neato have made a language picker webpage which points you to the versions fairly seamlessly… https://neatoexplained.com/

Hey,
according to what I know, this is not possible. Especially if you are talking about a SCORM export.
There are some solutions on the market from Rustici or Commlabindia which allow to combine multiple packages to one big package.
Also worth a look (SCORM 1.2): GitHub - skfriese/multi-lang-sco: A configurable SCORM 1.2 package for supporting multiple SCO's in different languages
I have adopted this a little bit and it seems to work very well.
An integrated solution would be MUCH better!

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I’ve seen some courses that start with a language picker. The language gets saved to a variable and the course shows pages according to that variable. You could do the same using Evolve’s logic.

However that means that you’ll have one very large couse, since you’ll need the same content in multiple languages.

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It definitely is possible with the vast majority of Learning Management Systems and without the need for any fancy tinkering with multi-SCO packages or anything like that.

The only time I’ve run into a problem with this technique was with one LMS (sorry don’t remember which one) that assumed that if the course didn’t call LMSInitialize within a certain amount of time it hadn’t started properly and wasn’t going to and would then simply cancel the SCORM session. The workaround for this was to add a timer to the ‘choose language’ page to let the learner know they only had a certain amount of time to choose their language otherwise they’d have to start again.

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Yes, LMS could somehow manage it but e.g. we are using Cornerstone (not one of the smaller ones…) and here you can set language equivalencies but do not have some kind of a language picker when starting the course. I would really appreciate if Cornerstone would add something but the fact is that it is not available. Other authoring tools offer such solutions and I somewhere read that the adapt framework does also have an add-in for that.

Adapt does have an add-in for that but it’s only usable with manually-created courses i.e. you can’t use it in the Adapt Authoring Tool. So it still requires manual effort to setup, though does have the advantage that the course .zip ends up being much smaller as you can share assets across languages.

Hi @riallara,
It can be done. I’ve built a couple of multilanguage single SCORM courses. There are a few things to be mindful of - like you cannot have a right to left language like Arabic in the same course as LTR languages. Unfortunately, the courses are client bespoke so I cannot share public links. If you want to web meet and see how it’s done let me know.

Best,
Andy

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Hi @Andy_Moorman! Thank you for this. Did you have to have all translated language in the single SCORM file? I’m just worried about the file size for big courses.

Hi @hbailey, thank you for the response!

Would these courses be exported as Web versions?

Hi,

The course has 6 languages, takes around 20 mins to complete and contains audio. The total file size is 28 MB. If it had video(s) I’d stream rather than embed to keep the file size low.