Someone testing their course

If you’re like many e-learning developers, your LMS has prompted numerous head-scratching (or head-banging) moments. Perhaps your course won’t play or resume in your LMS, or it isn’t tracking properly.

Job number one: identify the problem. And to do that, we recommend a handy tool called SCORM Cloud.

SCORM Cloud is an industry-standard testing engine developed by Rustici Software, an organization that knows a lot about SCORM and helped develop its successor (xAPI/Tin Can API).

It supports all LMS specs—AICC, SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004, xAPI, and cmi5—and it’s free, making it an ideal LMS troubleshooting superhero. (You can create an account here.)

In this article, we’ll show you how to use SCORM Cloud to test your project, from zipping your content to verifying tracking. Here we go!

Step 1: Zip Your Content

First, publish your course for LMS and create a zipped file of the published output. 

If you’re using Storyline 360, Presenter 360, Quizmaker 360, or Engage 360, you can do this by clicking on the Zip button in the Publish Successful window.

Screenshot with a cursor over the Zip button

If you’re using Rise 360, export your Rise 360 course as a cmi5, xAPI, SCORM, or AICC package and save it to your computer. 

If you’re testing AICC content, see this article for special instructions.

Step 2: Upload Your Published Output

Log in to SCORM Cloud, then click Add Content and select Import a SCORM, AICC, xAPI, or cmi5 package.

Screenshot with a cursor over the Import button

Then click Browse, find your Zip file, and click Open. Finally, click on Import Course.

Screenshot with a cursor over the Import Course button

SCORM Cloud will upload your course and take you to the course home page.

Step 3: Create an Invitation

It’s possible to launch your course directly from the course home page, but opening it that way doesn’t mimic a true learner experience and results won’t show in LMS reports. That’s why we recommend clicking Share and then Invite

Screenshot with a cursor over the Invite button

That will open up another window. Here, click on Create Invitation

Screenshot with a cursor over the Create Invitation button

This will generate an unguessable URL that you can use yourself or share with others. For an extra layer of security, you could also choose the Private Invitation option.

Step 4: Test Your Course

Copy the URL into the address bar of a new browser window. Enter your email address and name. Your results will be tracked under these credentials. Then, click on Ok. Now take me to my training. 

Screenshot with a cursor over the Ok button

At this point, test your course and attempt to reproduce the problems that prevented it from behaving as expected in your LMS. Watch for display problems of any kind, make sure your content suspends and resumes as you’d expect, and keep an eye out for unexpected behavior in general.

When you’re done testing, exit the course and confirm that your score and status are displayed correctly.

Screenshot showing the results

Step 5: Verify Tracking

Now that you’ve tested your course as a learner would experience it, you can review the SCORM Cloud reports for accuracy. To do so, return to the course details page, click Reportage, then drill down into the available reporting data.

Screenshot with a cursor over Reportage

Tip: If your course details page is no longer open, just return to your course library and click the course name.

What’s Next?

If your course works properly in SCORM Cloud but not in your LMS, open a support case with your LMS provider to troubleshoot the issue. They’ll know how best to help with LMS-specific problems.

If your Articulate content doesn’t play, resume, or track correctly in SCORM Cloud, submit a case to our support team so we can take a closer look. Be sure to include a copy of your project file so we can try to reproduce the problem.

Need more help troubleshooting? Check out these other resources:

If you have any other troubleshooting suggestions, share your thoughts with us and other community members in the comments below.

And if you’re tired of spending time troubleshooting your LMS, try Reach 360. Our frictionless LMS is integrated with Articulate 360 apps, so you can publish directly and be confident that everything will work as expected. It’s fast and hassle-free!

40 Comments
Ron Isaiah
Justin Grenier
David Fair
Reinier Post
Brigitte Cahill

Need some help, quick! I've just run into an issue where I'm getting a 'malformed' error when I try and update Scorm Cloud with my updated course. So the course does not update. Their support folks have told me it's caused by having spaces in my course title and have directed me to replace the spaces with underscores. So now, my title reads something like this: 5-This_is_my_Course_Name. This would be fine but this is also now what my learners will see up at the top left corner in the player! Anyone else had this issue? Is there a workaround to this that you know of, that I can do in Storyline? (They have logged it as a Scorm Cloud bug, but this is their temporary solution. This is not an acceptable workaround to me, and I wondered if anyone has found some other way to deal with this... Expand

Jean K.
Jennifer Brown

Jean, does your organization have their own SharePoint server? If so, and you don't to track, just make available on demand, that's an option. There's a thread on that https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/uploading-to-sharepoint. I see you also had a response on this thread, https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/e-learning-content-delivery but I don't see a specific mention of SharePoint as an option there. I've successfully used SharePoint to deliver tutorials that we simply needed people to use and it's really just a matter of minor tweaking to get it to work. The biggest hitch is often making sure there are no blank spaces in the output folder name to get rid of those ugly garbage characters in SharePoint file paths. H... Expand

Alex Arathoon
Joe Donnelly
Darren McNeill

I would like to see additional testing support for Mobile devices if possible. Many users of SCORM Cloud use it because they do not have the technical ability to troubleshoot content. It is common, but a mistake to assume that content development vendors will create the content perfectly and will work as expected. I have rarely been satisfied with the results from external vendors. The flow tends to be that the customer gets the "SCORM Package" of the course, they load it into SCORM Cloud, and it passes the testing. It is then uploaded to the required LMS for deployment and then other issues arise unexpectedly. Also, because of the new focus on Mobile, the course may work fine on a desktop tested in SCORM Cloud, but when viewed on a mobile device it is a completely different experie... Expand

Ryan Donnelly
Paula Galvin
Sokratis papachristos