Q: What ADL acquisition guidance is available across the services?

A: The ADL Acquisition Guidance Document is a comprehensive collection of guidance information arranged around the major phases of a DoD acquisition. ADL acquisition support is based on this primary resource that covers relevant policy and contract deliverables based on MIL-PRF-29612B Performance Specification for Training Data Products. MIL-PRF-29612B and the MIL-HDBK-29612 series of handbooks provide comprehensive discussion on the acquisition and development of training products for DoD. While MIL-PRF-29612B and the MIL-HDBK-29612 handbooks are excellent resources, they were written at a time when an earlier version of SCORM was in effect. Consequently, some of the terminology in these documents is obsolete and no longer exists in the current version of SCORM. The ADL Acquisition Guidance Document is a helpful resource acquisition professionals can use to acquire current ADL capabilities based on MIL-PRF-29612B contract deliverables. The guidance takes into consideration products from both the software and the instructional design points of view. These documents can be downloaded from the Joint ADL Co-Lab website.

Q: What are some Intellectual Property (IP) Rights considerations?

A: According to DoD Instruction 1322.26, Development, Management, and Delivery of Distributed Learning, Intellectual Property (IP) and government rights to software should be considered at the outset of any ADL related project. The IP Rights area discusses these requirements in the context of the ADL Registry and SCORM. For more information refer to the Joint ADL Co-Lab website.

Q: Are there tools available to help estimate the cost of ADL products?

A: Managers interested in estimating costs of SCORM and related technology programs will want to review the tools available in the Cost Estimation area. The COSCOMO cost estimating model available there is the result of a FY05 Joint ADL Co-Lab prototype effort based on the popular COCOMO II model tailored specifically for SCORM development projects. This tool can be downloaded from the Joint ADL Co-Lab website support area.

Q: Are there some style guides available?

A: The publications below are very comprehensive in nature, but the table of contents of each represents some good areas of guidance for a style guide. As you can see, there are many dimensions of style.

• The Air Force IMI Style Guide
• Navy ILE Content, Design, Development, and Deployment
• Navy ILE Technical Specifications and Guidelines
• Navy ILE Instructional Content Style Guide
• Marine Corps IMI Style Guide

Also, many ADL related style guides are extensions of web standard/style conventions since most ADL content is web content.

• Marine Corps Web Standards

Q: Are there SCO design templates available?

A: There is a template at the back of the SCORM Best Practices Guide for Content Developers (Pages 70 and 71).

Q: What about metadata guidance?

A: The SCORM Best Practices Guide for Content Developers offers some general guidance (Section 3.4 Locating Your Instructional Materials). The SCORM Content Aggregation Model (CAM) Technical Book (Specification) has detailed guidance that is general to SCORM (Section 4.2 SCORM Metadata Creation). The Navy ILE Content, Design, Development, and Deployment Guide represents an example of further tailoring metadata guidance for a specific organization (Section 3.2 ILE Content Metadata Requirements).