In an earlier post, I wrote about how to properly integrate Adaptive Curriculum Activity Objects inside Moodle. After having success with that, the client now needs to have the activity object as part of a LAMS sequence.
The approach I came up with is to have the URL to the scorm activity created as a resource in the LAMS sequence. This particular client's LAMS server is in a different domain and port than the Moodle server and it doesn't satisfy the requirements of JavaScript's Same Origin Policy. This restriction presents a minor issue when launching the resource in a framed LAMS window. The only way to integrate it properly within LAMS is to have it launch in its window.
Solution Grove has a client who wanted to try out Adaptive Curriculum's (AC) Activity Objects (AO) inside Moodle. This initially sounded trivial since they provide SCORM compliant packages and I thought it was easy as just creating a SCORM activity for the AO. It turned out that AC's AOs are not standalone and they require authentication when installed on third party servers. Their objects use standard SCORM API calls for getting the user and session information then use these values to authenticate. The first part's the easy one since I don't need to write any code for that because Moodle already has API for SCORM 1.2.
The problem I encountered was that the authentication method used by AC needs to be run in a stateless manner through a server-to-server HTTP post using the user and session information that originated from the third party server (in this case, the moodle installation). This presents a problem for server-to-server communication because in moodle, the session id for the user is stored in a cookie and we will only be able to get that cookie if the script is run in the browser where it was issued. At this point, we are now in contact with AC to ask a few questions so that I can proceed implementing a code to support their AOs.
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