Why You Need to Move Past SCORM

This is a conversation that the learning industry has been avoiding for far too long.

For more than two decades, SCORM has been the quiet scaffold holding up digital learning. It's provided structure, interoperability, and a way to track the basics. Many of us built our careers based on SCORM courses. We zipped packages, uploaded files, test, and hoped that the LMS would cooperate.

As much as we appreciate the legacy, it's time to acknowledge something the industry has whispered for years: SCORM is holding us back. Technically.

This isn't a dramatic takedown. It's simply recognizing that today's learning environment has sprinted far past the architecture that once made perfect sense. If you learning ecosystem seems slow, shallow, or strangely cumbersome, the root cause is often SCORM.

Let's talk about why.

SCORM Is Heavy - Not by Accident

Opening a SCORM package feels like rummaging through a time capsule of early web development: nested folders, manifest files, inline JavaScript, and an intricate dance of browser-level API calls inside iFrames. All of it wrapped in a ZIP file the LMS must unpack and interpret.

This architecture made sense when the web was young. Today, it introduces friction everywhere. Content loads slower. Transitions lag. Browsers struggle with the outdated runtime model. And because SCORM assumes a single-domain, single-browser, desktop-centric world, platforms must build compatibility layers just to keep everything functioning.

The modern cloud is fast, distributed, device-agnostic, and continuously updated. SCORM is none of those things.

SCORM Limits the Data We Can See

In a world where nearly every digital interaction is tracked and analyzed, SCORM still operates with a vocabulary roughly the size of a postcard. It can capture completion, score, session time, and a handful of bookmarks. Nothing more.

Modern learning wants detail:

• Where did the learner hesitate?

• What did they retry?

• Which path did they choose?

• Where did confusion spike?

• What predicts mastery?

SCORM knows none of this.

You can’t build adaptive learning, meaningful feedback loops, or modern analytics on top of SCORM’s low-resolution tracking model. It simply wasn’t designed to support the kind of insight-rich learning ecosystems we now expect.

But What About xAPI?

It's a step forward, with caveats.

xAPI was introduced as the successor to SCORM, and in theory, it is much more capable. It can capture granular events, stream data, track experiences outside the LMS, and record activity across multiple contexts.

But xAPI carries its own structural burdens—burdens that many organizations underestimate.

The biggest is the requirement for an intermediary application, the Learning Record Store (LRS). Unlike an LMS, an LRS isn’t meant for humans; it requires a second system (or a custom layer) to make data usable, visual, and actionable. That creates more moving parts, more vendor dependencies, and more integration complexity.

xAPI also leaves enormous flexibility in how statements are designed and structured, which sounds empowering but often leads to:

• inconsistent data models

• nonstandard verbs and structures

• fractured analytics

• higher implementation costs

• interoperability problems of a different kind

So even though xAPI unlocks potential SCORM never could, it still inherits the same fundamental idea: data must pass through a separate, rigid system before it becomes useful. In practice, this can be just as limiting as SCORM’s ZIP-file architecture—just in a different place in the workflow.

The result? A modern standard that still feels heavier than it should.

SCORM (and Often xAPI) Create Workflow Friction

Ask any designer or developer what slows them down and you’ll hear a familiar story: packaging, exporting, uploading, retesting, republishing. Even xAPI content needs special wrappers, configuration files, and environment setups to behave properly.

The workflow hasn’t aged well.

In a world of cloud-native tools where everything else updates in real time, learning content remains one of the few digital artifacts still tied to ZIP files, manual uploads, version mismatches, caching issues, and brittle testing cycles.

SCORM Prevents Real-Time Updating When It Matters Most

Learning is no longer a once-a-year exercise. It supports product launches, regulatory changes, compliance cycles, new clinical data, shifting business priorities, and daily updates to customer success content.

But SCORM locks content behind its packaging.

Even the smallest tweak requires a multi-step update cycle.

And while xAPI content can be more flexible, most of it is still tied to the same external-to-the-LMS packaging workflow. You can’t simply update the browser-accessible experience and call it done; the system must reconcile packages, manifests, statements, and LRS connections.

In fast-moving industries, that delay becomes costly.

SCORM and xAPI Struggle in the Cloud

Here's the reality that non-technical people rarely see.

Both standards were designed around the idea that learning data should flow through specialized systems instead of the open, distributed, API-connected web that everything else now uses.

SCORM needs:

• a very specific browser runtime

• an LMS API finder

• a frozen tracking model

• xAPI needs:

• a separate LRS

• a statement structure

• an analytics layer on top of that

Both require extra architecture just to connect content, system, and data. The modern cloud doesn’t need any of this. It runs cleaner when applications speak directly to each other through APIs, not through legacy-defined middle layers. The modern cloud easily connects to enterprise systems like HR and business intelligence.

Neither Standard was Designed for AI

AI-powered learning thrives on:

• high-frequency interactions

• behavioral signals

• real-time feedback

• dynamic content generation

• adaptive pathways

• data that flows instantly

SCORM cannot deliver that data.

xAPI can deliver more—but only through an LRS that wasn’t designed for AI either.

Both standards essentially slow the system down right at the moment when learning needs to get faster, smarter, and more responsive.

We've Outgrown the Standard

This doesn’t mean SCORM was a mistake. And it doesn’t mean xAPI was a failure. Both moved the industry forward in important ways. But we now live in a world where learning must be continuous, cloud-native, collaborative, data-rich, and able to evolve as fast as the business does.

That’s simply not what SCORM or xAPI were built for.

The future of learning requires systems that capture data directly, adapt instantly, deliver content fluidly, and support AI without workarounds or middleware.

The past 20 years were about standardizing content packages.

The next 20 years will be about standardizing performance outcomes.

A Note From Us

As a learning provider working with life sciences and other highly regulated industries, we eventually reached our breaking point. We didn’t drop SCORM on a whim—we dropped it because we were consistently frustrated by its performance issues, its slow workflows, and its limited analytical model. And while xAPI offered promise, the reliance on an LRS and the added layers of complexity made it only a partial solution. We needed something more modern, more connected, and far more adaptive.

Leaving SCORM—and stepping only partially into xAPI—wasn’t ideological. It was practical.

We needed learning to move at the speed of the business.

And based on conversations happening across the industry, we know many others feel the same.