TinCan reporting and editing tincan.xml

Sep 24, 2014

Hi,

I had some questions about TinCan reporting. I'm relatively new to Articulate (~ 1 year experience). Recently I've been experimenting with publishing Articulate Storyline courses using TinCan API and reporting them through my LMS. The LMS that I'm using is TalentLMS and they do provide support for TinCan.

When I package course from Storyline as TinCan and upload it on LMS, I can see basic reporting such as the user "experienced" events and "completed" course. Also, if there is a result slide, that result value is shown in the TinCan reporting too. I've couple of questions on this. I searched this forum as well as scavenged the interent but could not find the answers to my specific questions.

1. In the current TinCan reporting that I can see, it shows that the user "experienced" each slide in the course. But for each page visited it shows as "Experienced Page 1". I don't understand why it's page 1 for each slide. I checked the tincan.xml file and it was showing the value of "Page 1" for all the activities (except for the first and the last slide). I changed values there to read Page 2, Page 3 etc. but TinCan reporting in LMS still shows as "Page 1" for all slides. Does anyone know how I can fix this problem? I've attached the tincan.xml file that shows all "Page 1"s.

2. On the TalentLMS account settings I was able to locate "tincan endpoint URL" as well as the "Auth key". Although what I haven't been unable to figure out is where to include this information in the Articulate Storyline package. I found a lot of information on tin can endoint and how to define it etc but nothing on where does all that information goes. Does it go in the tincan.xml? or does it go somewhere else such as story.js file?

3. Based on the information on TinCan on the internet, it sounds like I should be able to report much more information than just user "experiencing" the slides and completing the course. My question is, again, where can I define that information? They mention about JSON statements but where exactly do they go? Does that all go in the tincan.xml file?

If anyone can share any example that they may have, that would be great.

Thank you.

Pushkar

tincan.xml

9 Replies

Niels van Drimmelen

over 9 years ago12/12/14 at 1:24 pm (UTC)

For question 1: you need to rename the slides in AS itself. The tincan.xml file is generated on every publish. You could edit the tincan.xml yourself, but then you need to do that on every publish. Also remember once a statement is written to the LRS, it can't be changed anymore.

For question 2: This type of information doesn't go in AS or the tincan.xml file. It should be provided in the querystring on launch. Useful information can be found here

For question 3: AS only supports a few different verbs. See this document for details. I think it should be possible to report more using javascript (there is a tincan.js library available), but I haven't been able to test is.

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard
Staff

over 9 years ago12/12/14 at 4:09 pm (UTC)

Thanks Niels for chiming in here - and I hope Pushkar is still subscribed to receive updates.

Pushkar Damle
Author

over 9 years ago12/13/14 at 4:52 pm (UTC)

Thank you so much Niels for responding. Your answers are very useful. I'm still trying to better understand TinCan and haven't had much success yet.

I've some custom variables created in the Articulate Storyline project. Would you know how I can pass those to the LRS via tincan? In my project I create a custom variable with the user "score" and I want to pass that via TinCan so that I can see what their score was. Do I have to make any modifications in the TinCan.xml? Any guidance that you may be able to provide would be great.

Thanks.

Pushkar