The DoD had been frustrated by problems they encountered when trying to share distance learning courses among different learning management systems used within the Department.

In 1997 they formed the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) specification group to create a way to make learning content portable across various systems.

ADL developed SCORM (Sharable Courseware Object Reference Model) to:

	facilitate moving course content and related information (such as student records) from one platform to another
	to make course content into modular objects that can be reused in other courses
	to enable any LMS to search others for usable course content