Unlocking Access to Openly Licensed Courses in Edovo: Why a SCORM Importer is the Next Step

The Opportunity: Expanding Learning in Correctional Facilities

Education is a powerful tool for rehabilitation, personal growth, and reentry success. Edovo already delivers valuable courses and learning resources to incarcerated individuals, helping them acquire new skills and knowledge. However, much of this content is built manually using Edovo’s Course Editor — a process that is convenient for creating lessons from scratch but inefficient for adding existing courses that already meet Edovo’s content and quality guidelines.

Around the world, thousands of high-quality, openly licensed courses are freely available online. Many of these courses are already structured to meet learning objectives, include engaging multimedia, and assess knowledge through quizzes. Unfortunately, Edovo’s current workflow requires staff or content partners to rebuild each course page-by-page in the Course Editor. This approach wastes time and risks reducing the richness of the original course materials.

Sources of Openly Licensed Courses

A wealth of openly licensed educational materials is available from reputable institutions and organizations. Some noteworthy sources include:

• MIT OpenCourseWare (OCW) – Offers complete university-level courses in a variety of disciplines, with videos, lecture notes, assignments, and exams, all openly licensed.
• OpenLearn (Open University) – Provides hundreds of free courses, from short introductions to full-length modules, many of which come with certificates of completion.
• Saylor Academy – Delivers structured, college-level and professional courses, openly licensed under Creative Commons, complete with assessments and certificates.
• Khan Academy – Features a vast library of video lessons, practice exercises, and quizzes, especially strong in math, science, and economics.
• OpenStax – Specializes in free, peer-reviewed textbooks and related course materials that could be adapted into structured lessons.
• OER Commons – A comprehensive repository aggregating resources from multiple institutions, covering K–12, higher education, and vocational skills.

Many of these resources are already available in standardized formats such as SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) or can be exported into SCORM with minimal effort.

Why Edovo Should Integrate Open Courses

Incorporating openly licensed courses into Edovo’s platform would significantly expand the breadth and depth of available educational opportunities. These courses are:

• Proven and High-Quality – Developed by subject matter experts and used by learners worldwide.
• Cost-Effective – Freely licensed, allowing Edovo to allocate resources toward delivery and infrastructure rather than content creation.
• Diverse – Covering academic subjects, vocational skills, digital literacy, health, and personal development.
• Flexible – Suitable for learners at different educational levels and with different goals.

Beyond improving access, adding these courses would enhance learner engagement by providing professionally designed, interactive, and multimedia-rich experiences that go beyond static PDFs or isolated videos.

The Case for a SCORM Importer

SCORM is an industry-standard format for e-learning content that allows courses to be packaged in a way that is portable between different Learning Management Systems (LMSs). By implementing a SCORM importer, Edovo could:

1. Eliminate Redundant Work – Avoid the need to manually rebuild lessons in the Course Editor.
2. Preserve Course Quality – Maintain the original course structure, multimedia, and interactive features.
3. Increase Content Velocity – Allow staff and content partners to rapidly deploy new courses.
4. Empower Content Partners – Enable partners to create or adapt courses using their preferred industry-standard tools such as Moodle, Canvas, or Articulate, and then import them directly into Edovo.
5. Support Ongoing Updates – Make it easier to keep courses current by re-importing updated SCORM packages instead of editing them page-by-page.

For incarcerated learners, this means faster access to a broader range of educational opportunities — without sacrificing instructional quality.

Moving Forward

A SCORM importer represents a logical, impactful upgrade to Edovo’s platform. It would open the door to integrating a vast library of openly licensed courses, accelerate the content acquisition process, and empower content creators to work with the tools they already know and trust.

The ultimate beneficiaries would be the learners themselves — individuals striving to improve their knowledge, develop new skills, and prepare for life after incarceration. By embracing open educational resources and industry standards like SCORM, Edovo can scale its mission more effectively and ensure that every learner has access to world-class education, regardless of their circumstances.