SCORM is the long-standing standard for packaging an online training course so that it can move between learning systems. Instead of building a course that only works inside one platform, you package it as a SCORM file, and any learning management system that supports SCORM, which most of them do, can run that course, record who completed it, and report their scores back. For a training manager, this is the difference between being locked into one vendor forever and being able to take your courses with you. If a distributor's training portal is replaced in three years, SCORM-packaged courses move to the new portal instead of being rebuilt from scratch. The trade-off is that SCORM is an older standard with limits: it mostly tracks "did they finish" and "what did they score," and it expects a traditional learning platform to run inside. For anything more detailed than that, its successor, xAPI, picks up where SCORM stops. When a course is described as "SCORM-compliant," it means it will load and track properly in a standard learning system.
Glossary entry