I’m going to tell you about SCORM files. Stay with me — there are millions of dollars and 500 schools at the end of this.
SCORM is an e-learning standard from the early 2000s. The idea is elegant: package a course as a standardized file, and any Learning Management System in the world can run it. Think shipping containers — every container is the same shape on the outside, so any port can handle it, regardless of what’s inside. SCORM did that for online courses.
The problem at SENAI was that each of its 500+ schools had become its own island. They were all technically speaking SCORM, but nobody had built the port infrastructure to connect them. Schools were creating their own content independently — videos, PDFs, interactive modules — storing it in local drives, school-specific LMS instances, email attachments, wherever. When I got involved, the network had accumulated 1.7TB of educational content that was effectively invisible to the rest of the system. A school in São Paulo might spend weeks building an electronics training module that a school in Porto Alegre had already built two years earlier.
The Problem Was Infrastructure, Not Content
The content existed. The problem was there was nowhere to put it that everyone could reach.
My first instinct was to map what we actually had. That’s when 1.7TB became a real number to me — not a data storage challenge, but a sign of how much work had already been done in isolation. Thousands of hours of educational production, locked in silos.
The solution had two parts: a place to store things, and a way to distribute them.
The Portal de Recursos Didáticos (Educational Resources Portal) became the central repository. Schools could upload content, tag it by knowledge area, and make it searchable across the network. Advanced search, organized around SENAI’s curriculum framework. The whole thing built in-house rather than licensed from a commercial provider — which turned out to matter a lot for costs.
The SCORM Hub was the distribution layer. This is the part I’m still proud of. Google Classroom had become the de facto platform for many SENAI schools, but SCORM files are LMS-native — they’d never been designed to work inside Google’s ecosystem. Before we built the Hub, if a teacher wanted to use a SCORM module, they needed a full LMS running. Google Classroom wasn’t that.
We changed that. The SCORM Hub let teachers take any SCORM package from the portal and deliver it inside Google Classroom, with full tracking and completion data. As far as I know, it was the first implementation of this kind anywhere.
What “In-House” Actually Meant
The build-vs-buy decision on cloud storage was driven by numbers. Commercial cloud licensing for the volume SENAI needed was expensive, and the cost scaled with content volume — which was only going to grow. Building an in-house solution cost more upfront but reduced ongoing storage costs by 70%. At SENAI’s scale, that’s a meaningful number over time.
🚧 Need more context: What was the specific cost comparison that drove the in-house decision? Was there a particular commercial provider being evaluated?
The migration itself — moving 1.7TB from scattered sources into the new portal — was handled through a pipeline we called T2K internally.
🚧 Need more context: What was T2K, exactly? Who built it and how long did the migration take?
Rede Docente: The Community Layer
The repository solved the storage problem. But storage alone doesn’t change behavior. You can build the best library in the world and still have teachers creating duplicate content in isolation because they don’t know the library exists or don’t trust what’s in it.
We built Rede Docente (Teacher Network) to address the human side. A community space on Discord and Telegram where teachers across all 500+ schools could share resources, ask questions, co-create content, and give feedback on existing materials. The portal gave teachers a place to put things. Rede Docente gave them a reason to.
🚧 Need more context: What were the adoption metrics for Rede Docente? How many teachers actively participated? Were there specific schools or regions that drove early adoption?
What I Learned
The technical problem was interesting. The SCORM-Google Classroom integration required real creativity — there was no existing pattern to follow. But the harder problem was adoption: convincing 500 schools with deeply embedded local habits to trust a central system with their content.
The answer, I think, was making the value immediately obvious. If your school uploads a module, someone three states away can use it tomorrow. If that happens enough times, contribution becomes a norm rather than an imposition.
🚧 Need more context: What were the specific usage numbers post-launch? How many schools were actively uploading content vs. just consuming? Any specific metrics on SCORM Hub adoption within Google Classroom?