Written by Paul Brown | Last updated 17.11.2025 | 11 minute read
In educational technology, interoperability is no longer a “nice to have”; it is a fundamental requirement for any platform that wants to be taken seriously by institutions, educators and corporate training teams. Learners expect a seamless experience where content, tools and data flow effortlessly between virtual learning environments, assessment platforms, content libraries and analytics dashboards. For developers, this seamlessness is rarely simple to achieve.
Two of the most important building blocks in this landscape are LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) and SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model). While they have different histories, architectures and use cases, they both sit at the heart of how learning systems talk to each other. Understanding how to integrate and combine them intelligently can make the difference between an EdTech product that constantly fights integration fires and one that slots elegantly into existing ecosystems.
This article explores how to approach LTI and SCORM from a developer’s perspective, how to design for interoperability from day one, and how to keep your product future-ready as standards and expectations evolve.
LTI and SCORM are often talked about in the same breath, but they solve different problems. SCORM is primarily a packaging and runtime communication standard for e-learning content. It focuses on how learning resources are bundled, launched, tracked and reported in a learning management system (LMS). An LMS imports a SCORM package, launches it in a browser, and uses a JavaScript-based API to exchange information such as completion status, scores and time spent.
LTI, on the other hand, is about tool interoperability rather than content packaging. It describes how one learning platform (a “platform” or “consumer”) can securely launch and exchange data with another application (a “tool”) via the web. Instead of importing a zipped course package, the LMS or virtual learning environment (VLE) launches an external application – which might be an assessment engine, coding sandbox, simulation or content service – passing secure context and user information, and receiving outcomes or events in return.
From a strategic perspective, SCORM tends to live at the content layer, while LTI operates at the tool and service layer. SCORM is ideal for self-contained learning modules such as compliance training, onboarding content and microlearning courses. LTI is more suitable for dynamic, service-based experiences: proctoring systems, discussion tools, adaptive learning engines and any application that needs to be updated independently of the LMS.
In practice, most institutions do not use one or the other. Their ecosystems are a patchwork of old and new: SCORM-based legacy courses sitting alongside modern LTI tool integrations. This is why EdTech products that can handle both standards elegantly provide a strong competitive advantage. They can plug into existing SCORM-heavy environments while offering the richer, more integrated experiences made possible by LTI.
For EdTech developers, the challenge is not simply “supporting LTI” or “supporting SCORM”, but designing a product architecture that treats interoperability as a first-class concern. This starts with recognising that LTI and SCORM are not mere technical checkboxes; they influence how you model users, courses, activities and data flows.
At an architectural level, LTI-driven integrations often make your product feel like a deeply embedded part of the LMS. The LTI launch conveys a rich context: which course the learner is in, which activity is being launched, who the instructor is, and sometimes institutional identifiers and role information. Your application can translate this into internal entities such as tenants, classes, enrolments and permissions. A robust mapping strategy is crucial. If you naively tie everything to LMS-specific identifiers, you risk brittle integrations that break when institutions restructure courses or migrate platforms.
SCORM introduces a different set of design considerations. A SCORM SCO (Sharable Content Object) is typically self-contained, with its own navigation, assessment logic and tracking. As the SCORM runtime communicates status (for example, “completed”, “passed”, “failed”) and data elements (such as score or interactions) back to the LMS, you must decide how much of that information you want to replicate or extend in your own back end. Some vendors choose to treat SCORM purely as an LMS concern, while others ingest SCORM data into their own analytics layer for richer reporting and personalisation.
A thoughtful architecture often combines both approaches. You might support SCORM import for existing content libraries while offering LTI as the preferred integration for your core service. In doing so, you position your platform as a bridge: able to work with SCORM packages where needed, but encouraging customers to unlock more advanced capabilities through LTI-based workflows and APIs.
When planning your architecture, it is useful to anchor design decisions around a few key interoperability goals:
By answering these questions early, you avoid the common pitfall of bolting LTI and SCORM on at the end of the development process and discovering mismatches in data models, identity management and reporting.
Once you step from architecture into implementation, LTI and SCORM require quite different mindsets. LTI is fundamentally web-protocol based and aligns comfortably with modern SaaS practices. SCORM, by contrast, has roots in early e-learning and can feel like stepping back in time, particularly around client-side JavaScript APIs and older browser assumptions.
For LTI integrations, a core decision is whether your product will act purely as a tool or whether you also intend to behave as a platform that launches other tools. Most EdTech companies start by implementing the tool side. This involves supporting the relevant LTI version, handling launches securely, interpreting context claims (such as user roles and course identifiers) and optionally returning outcome data, grades or events. Ensuring idempotency and robustness around repeated launches is essential – for example, when learners refresh their browser or re-launch the tool from within the LMS.
SCORM implementation can sit in different places in your product stack. If you are building an LMS-like platform, you may need full SCORM runtime support: parsing SCORM manifests, launching SCOs in an iframe or new window, exposing the SCORM JavaScript API to the content, and persisting data calls. This involves careful handling of session state, cross-window communication and browser quirks. If your product is not an LMS, you may instead focus on generating SCORM-compliant packages that customers can upload to their existing LMS. In that case, you must ensure the manifest and runtime calls correspond to the progress and scoring logic of your own system.
One particularly powerful pattern is to use SCORM as a distribution format but LTI as the integration mechanism. For example, you might ship SCORM packages that contain minimal content plus an embedded LTI launcher. When the learner opens the SCORM package in their LMS, it immediately launches your tool via LTI, combining the familiar packaging workflow of SCORM with the richer capabilities and data security of LTI. This helps organisations that are wedded to SCORM workflows gradually transition towards service-based architectures.
The biggest practical challenge is often testing across the heterogeneous reality of institutional ecosystems. Different LMSs interpret standards slightly differently, implement optional features in inconsistent ways, and have their own quirks around deep-linking, gradebook synchronisation and content import. Building a robust test matrix that covers multiple LMSs and versions is therefore crucial. Automated integration tests, sandbox environments and close collaboration with pilot customers all help to surface edge cases before they become production incidents.
As soon as your EdTech product begins to be adopted by multiple institutions, the operational aspects of LTI and SCORM integration become as important as the initial build. Security, scalability and maintainability need to be treated as ongoing disciplines rather than one-off milestones.
From a security perspective, LTI-based integrations require particular care around authentication, authorisation and data minimisation. Your tool will be receiving user-identifying information, role data and course context from multiple platforms. Decisions about what data you actually need to perform your function, how long you retain it and how you protect it have implications for privacy regulations and institutional trust. It is sensible to design your claims-handling pipeline so that non-essential data can be easily dropped or anonymised, and to make data usage transparent to your customers.
Scalability matters because LTI tools often experience spiky traffic patterns. A large university might have thousands of learners launching your tool within a short period at the start of term, or a corporate training rollout might trigger a surge in usage. Architecting for horizontal scaling, stateless launch handling and efficient session management is essential. Caching platform configuration, using robust key management for cryptographic operations and ensuring your grade or outcome services can handle bulk operations all contribute to a smoother experience for institutions.
In SCORM workflows, operational risk often shows up around browser compatibility and content longevity. Institutions may have SCORM packages that were created years ago, using older authoring tools and assumptions about browser behaviour. When these are launched through your platform or in conjunction with your services, subtle issues can arise: window focus problems, mixed-content warnings, pop-up blockers, or API initialisation failures. Maintaining a well-documented set of supported environments and clear troubleshooting guidance helps reduce support overhead and gives customers confidence.
To keep integrations maintainable as your codebase evolves, it is wise to ring-fence LTI and SCORM concerns within dedicated modules or services. Treat the standards as integration boundaries rather than letting their specifics leak throughout your application logic. This makes it easier to upgrade your implementation when the standards evolve or when new profiles and extensions appear. It also enables you to expose a simpler internal API to the rest of your application, insulating developers from the lower-level details of launch messages, manifests or runtime calls.
Across both LTI and SCORM, there are recurring patterns that consistently support secure, scalable and maintainable implementations:
Treating these patterns as part of your product’s foundation allows you to add new features and expand to new institutions without repeatedly rediscovering the same integration challenges.
The learning technology landscape is not static. New interoperability frameworks, updated versions of LTI, emerging standards around learning analytics, and increasing regulatory scrutiny on learner data all shape what “good” integration looks like over time. For EdTech products, the question is not only how to work with LTI and SCORM today, but how to stay agile as expectations and standards change.
SCORM, for all its longevity, is widely recognised as a legacy standard in many respects. It has served institutions well for packaging and tracking self-paced content, but it was born in an era of single-screen, desktop-centric e-learning. Modern learning experiences span multiple devices, blend synchronous and asynchronous activities, and often incorporate social and experiential elements that SCORM cannot easily model. Recognising SCORM’s strengths and limits allows you to position it appropriately within your product roadmap: as a compatibility layer for existing content rather than the core of your innovation.
LTI, by contrast, aligns more naturally with web-based service architectures and is better suited to the distributed nature of modern learning ecosystems. However, it too will continue to evolve. New security recommendations, data privacy expectations and analytics use cases will influence how LTI is implemented and extended. Designing your integration code as a replaceable, well-defined module means you can upgrade underlying libraries or adopt new profiles without rewriting your product’s core logic.
Future-proofing also means thinking beyond technical standards to the broader narrative of interoperability. Institutions increasingly want to avoid vendor lock-in. They expect EdTech products to participate in open ecosystems where data can flow into learning record stores, analytics platforms and institutional reporting systems. Supporting LTI and SCORM is part of this story, but so is offering export capabilities, APIs and alignment with broader data models. An EdTech platform that demonstrates respect for institutional ownership of data and flexibility in how that data can be used earns strategic trust.
Ultimately, integrating LTI and SCORM is not just a compliance exercise. Done thoughtfully, it is a strategic design choice that shapes how your product fits into the complex, evolving world of learning technology. By understanding the distinct roles of LTI and SCORM, architecting for interoperability from the outset, implementing integrations with security and scalability in mind, and planning for change, you create an EdTech platform that can thrive across diverse institutions and future standards – not just the ones in place today.
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