Open questions/essay through Storyline in Moodle, can it be done?
Nov 12, 2014
Hello,
We have an issue with the reporting of open questions/essay questions in Moodle (version 2.7). Apparently there is a limitation of 255 characters in data that can be shown in the "cmi.interactions_N.student_response" field. All extra data goes into the "cmi.suspend_data" field. This is unworkable for our customers.
I know that you can make open questions/essay questions directly in Moodle but we do not want that, everything has to be in one module.
I have tried to raise the limit of the field by changing "CMIString4096 = '^[\\u0000-\\uffff]{0,4096}$';" to "CMIString4096 = '^[\\u0000-\\uffff]{0,40960}$';" and "CMIString256 = '^[\\u0000-\\uffff]{0,255}$';" to "CMIString256 = '^[\\u0000-\\uffff]{0,2550}$';" in the "mod/scorm/datamodels/scorm_12.js.php"-folder.
We are using SCORM 2004 because we also need the question text in the reporting (with SCORM 1.2 the question text does not get exported). We are also aware that SCORM 2004 is not fully supported on Moodle but that is not the cause of this issue since we have tried with both versions. All the settings in "plugins/activity modules/SCORM package" have also been tried.
Does anybody know of a solution to make the "cmi.interactions_N.student_response" field bigger?
Kind regards,
Sander
23 Replies
In Moodle 2.7 we added a setting under admin > plugins > activities > SCORM called "Enable SCORM 1.2 standard mode" - which you can un-check and it will allow the SCORM player in Moodle to accept a higher character limit (64000 chars) but you will also need to adjust your SCORM packages as the SCORM package itself usually truncates the data before it sends it to the LMS to prevent errors. Someone else in the community here may be able to help you do this for Articulate packages.
Thanks Dan! I have tried it but it did not work for me which i understand now because of your explanation (about the need for SCORM packages to be adjusted).
Thanks,
Sander
Storyline and Presenter send all the date it is not truncated, the explanation Dan gives will not affect the 255 character limit.
Then the question is how to adjust the SCORM packages? or what is the alternative?
I think the alternative is to use the Moodle essay question rather than the storyline one.
Does not work for me. We want to provide them one space to read stories, answer MCQs and then also put some essay input. We do not want them to go out of storyline object to do it.
Hi Raheel,
If you're unable to use the Moodle option as Phil mentioned, have you looked into is you can use a different SCORM output or are you restricted to SCORM 1.2? Have you reached out to your Moodle team to see if there is anything else you can look into?
I can use other SCORM formats as well. Please tell me the step-by-step
procedure for both articulate and moodle. Multiple responses are confusing
me.
You should only use Scorm 1.2 in Moodle, I think the limit for any text entry questions will be 256 characters, Dan will know.
Hi Raheel,
Sorry for any confusion - I'll defer to Dan and Phil as Moodle users and Articulate users, as I can only speak to the Articulate side of things.
if standards mode is disabled then the limit for SCORM 1.2 packages in Moodle should be 64000 chars - although I'm not sure any of the built-in reports will display a large essay question response in a very nice way, you might need to export the content to excel so you can read it properly.
Hey Dan instead of the bookmarking/resume data we are talking about the limit for text entry in inteacrtions it seems to be 256 characters can this be changed?
Sent from my iPhone
yes - when standards mode is disabled we change all strings that the 1.2 spec defines to the higher value of "64000 Chars" (suspend_data, comments, lesson_location, interactions, objectives etc...)
..but I have seen SCORM packages truncate this data themselves... can't remember if articulate does this. Running the Moodle scorm debugger while you are entering essay question data might help to diagnose.
Articulate packages generally just send everything and hope the LMS can cope. Worth testing though. Thanks for confirming.
I have the same issue with the essey question in AS2 and have asked the LMS team to untick the "Enable SCORM 1.2 standard mode". However the result is the same as Moodle only record 255 characters even in the Excel export. I have also tried to publish to 2004 and Moodle did not record the response at all (blank in both report and excel export). Any suggestions?
Hi Yang,
This thread is a bit older, so I don't know that folks are still subscribed - but I know that Dan and Phil are regulars here in the forums so perhaps they'll be able to share a bit more of their Moodle expertise here with you.
Thanks Ashley.
This can be done, but it's a little hacky.
There are two parts to solving this problem - you need to tell Moodle to accept larger amounts of data by unticking 'Enable SCORM 1.2 standard mode' but you also need to get Storyline to stop truncating the responses. In the file /lms/ScormFunctions.js there are four places where the truncation happens (lines 855, 862, 919 and 926 on my version). If you comment these lines out after publishing but before zipping, Storyline will send the full text.
You can make this the default behaviour of your Storyline install by editing the master copy at "C:\Program Files (x86)\Articulate\Articulate Storyline 2\Content\lms\". If you're going to do this, make sure you have a backup of the original file you can swap back in. Just in case.
An example of the edited file is attached.
Thanks for popping in to share your experience and solution with the community here Hamish :)
Hamish,
Thank you so much for providing this solution. After testing, I was able to show the entire text response in the results.
Great news Trevor - thanks for popping in to share that this thread was able to assist you as well :) Love to see the older threads continuing to assist.
Welcome to E-Learning Heroes!
Is this still valid today? Has anyone tried this in the latest versions. I am having the same problem but we don't use Moodle - we have a Docebo LMS solution. But I am getting truncating that I would like to stop.
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