SMCR Academy is a set of 14 SCORM files that you need to set up on your own Learning Management System (LMS). We don't recommend you purchase SMCR Academy unless you have your own SCORM-compliant LMS and know how to use it.
To test SMCR Academy, we set up a Learning Management System (LMS) ourselves to make sure everything works. We thought we would explain what we did here in case it helps.
We had to change two default settings in the standard set-up of our LMS to run SMCR Academy. We mention them here because you may find them helpful.
- The maximum file size that can be uploaded to your LMS should be at least 200 MB.
- The maximum execution time for your LMS should be at least 160 seconds.
Just to be clear, these are settings that would be part of your LMS. Your LMS is third-party software that PartnerVine doesn't control. As a practical matter, we'd recommend uploading the files to your LMS first and seeing if they work, because the settings on your LMS may be different than our default settings.
For those of you who are developers, here's what we did. We set up Moodle as our LMS. We tested it on a local production environment, using MAMP on a Mac. We didn't set up a cloud version of Moodle. We used Moodle as our LMS because the sandbox version is free and the underlying code is open source. Moodle accepts SCORM files but can't create them, so we wouldn't call it a truly SCORM-compliant LMS. It did work for checking if SMCR Academy works though.
In Moodle, you can check the maximum file size that can be uploaded under Dashboard/Site administration/Security/Site security settings, but you have to change the file size by altering the PHP settings in the php.ini file for post_max_size and upload_max_size in MAMP.
In terms of the maximum execution time, when we tried to upload four of the SMCR Academy files, the execution time lasted more than the default setting of 30 seconds in Moodle and the upload led to a link to a blank page. The way we figured out that we needed to make the maximum execution time longer was by turning on "Extra Moodle debug messages for developers" under Debugging in Dashboard/Site administration/Development. After turning on the debug messages, we got the following message error: "Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded in /Applications/MAMP/htdocs/moodle/lib/filestorage/zip_archive.php on line 254". When we got that message, we knew to change the maximum execution time in the php.ini folder. It worked. Here's a note on how to find the maximum execution time setting in Moodle.
So you know, the four SMCR Academy files that took more than 30 seconds to upload were:
- IR Marketing Fund Distribution Rules – Case Study Assessment
- SMCR Conduct Rules for Portfolio Managers & Analysts - Case Study Assessment
- SMCR Conduct Rules for Traders - Case Study Assessment
- Senior Management Training for SMCR
The Case Study Assessment files are noticably larger than the other files in SMCR Academy.
Further Resources
Here's a video on installing Moodle as a sandbox.
Here's Moodle documentation on changing the file size in Moodle.
Here's a note on how to find the maximum execution time setting in Moodle.
You can download Moodle here.
You can download MAMP here.
To go to the SMCR Academy product page, click here.
For a review of SMCR Academy, go here.
For an article on Simmons & Simmons launch on PartnerVine, go here.
For information on Simmons & Simmons, the law firm behind SMCR Academy, go here.
