Articulate Presenter working in an AICC LMS

Hi Adam,

The problem you're seeing is that your LMS is still storing the suspend data (resume data) in the system for that content item.  Thus, when the end-user returns to the content, they're being asked to resume the course.  This is the expected workflow.

Unless there's something you can do on the LMS side to remove the suspend data after completion, you will continue to have end-users that experience this.  Again, it's not a bug.  Rather, it's working as it should.

Hi Brian,

Ok, I'll have to check with our LMS admin because the weird thing is that it is only affecting a few of the modules (approx. 3) rather than all of the modules on our LMS, if that is the case.

Hi Adam,

Double-check your modules & see if the "flash cookie" option is enabled in your player templates.  For more information, see the link below:

http://www.articulate.com/blog/publish-to-lms-with-studio-09/

Brian,

I've tried every option possible. The settings will either completely disregard  the bookmarking capability, even if the learner exits the module while in the middle of it, which I do not want, or it asks the person to resume the course, whether they completed the mod or not.

Is it possible there is a local cache cookie that is being stored that I could contact our IT department about to see if they could have it removed everytime an employee completes a course?

Hi Adam,

I "think" what you're having problems is the scorm cmi.exit status. At my previous employer we had an almost identical problem with a company-wide rollout and I've seen other posters inquire about it.  Needless to say, it wreaked quite a bit of havoc. While the suspend status is working as Brian describes, it's also impossible for Articulate to test it on every LMS.  Our issue was with scorm, not aicc, and not every course was affected.

I belive Articulate uses scorm.com as their test bed, but correct me if I'm wrong.  And while, ADL has "standards", LMS vendors use those more as guidelines, in my experience.  The requested completion period expired and we never did come to a full resolution, but here are a few things you might try:

• You might check the lms.js file of the course and see if you can find the code to alter the cmi.suspend. I strongly recommend doing this in a test environment for obvious reasons   You might sort through some of the comments on this post and see if anything helps http://www.articulate.com/blog/publish-to-lms-with-studio-09/

• If the course is required anually are there any updates so that you could push out a new course?  This can be teadious, but an decent LMS should have mass registration.

• We couldn't use local cookies or flash cookes because the cache was cleared each time the end user closed their browser.

This is all geared towards scorm and I'm not as familiar w/ aicc and publishing to aicc.

Additionally, you might see if there is anything in this thread that might help - http://www.articulate.com/forums/articulate-quizmaker/12330-scorm-cmi-exit-value-always-set-suspend.html

Lastly, we didn't have any issues w/ Captivate like this, so there is something quirky with Articulate and I hope they dig into it more for the next version.

Hope that helps,

/B

Thanks Bill,

I will dig into this deeper tomorrow. Also later this afternoon after finding out about the 3 modules I investigated and found out it's not just those 3 modules, employees have reported it is MOST of them, if not ALL of the Articulate modules.

I spoke with someone from a Subsidiary company and they mentioned I may have to contact IT to change a setting on IE8 so it does not store some local cache cookie. Ahhh, some good research time will be in store this week. :(

If I do find the "cmi.suspend" coding any idea as to what I would change it to, or is that located in one of the links you provided me?

Some of the courses that are required annually don't always change but we do like to, at least, give the module a different appearance every so many years if there isn't an update so the learner isn't bored with the CBT.

I agree though, we do not have this issue when running Captivate modules.

Hey Adam,

Just curious, but what LMS are you running?

We never did come to a full resolution because our brains turned to spagetti and the required time to complete them expired. The courses were going to be overhauled after that session anyway.

I'd suggest doing some research on the cmi.suspend and cmi.success_status because now that i think about it the success status was being set to suspend rather than passed/failed.

http://nishanaa.blogspot.com/2009/04/scorm-12-and-scorm-2004-standards.html

Also, turn on the logging for the course and see what it's sending to the LMS. I believe it's a setting in an xml or js file to turn on. Hopefully one of the techies can specify the file.

I say research it because there's a lot of info out there on it, but it's kind of scattered.  Also, I keep giving scorm examples, but you're using aicc.

HTH,

/B

The LMS we are using is Risc VTA.

I have talked to our LMS admin and turns out awhile ago our company migrated the LMS and the servers that handled it from location to our new one. She mentioned they never use to have this issue until after the move so now we may be thinking that the same settings were not captured after the move.

We have taken a look at the logging settings already and they seem to be reporting as it is suppose to.

I'll take a look at the cmi.suspend and cmi.success_status and also do some research to see what is the issue.

I will let you know what I find Bill.

Thanks

Adam,

Did you ever find a resolution to this issue?

Thanks

Keith,

Afraid not...Our IT department are still troubleshooting the issue. Are you having the same issue?

We're having a similar issue but I'm starting to this that our problem resides with our LMS and not the Articulate content we've published. In our LMS, upon completion of the course and closing the window, the user can choose one of thre choices: Go to my to do list, Go to my transcript, and Go to the main LMS dashboard page. I have two different courses that use the same template and publish settings in Articulate but only one of them is recording a completion when the user clicks the three links, and in that case, it only works with two of the three links.

I'm about as frustrated as possible with this and I'm ready to throw the entire LMS in the trash.

Hmmmm that does sound more like an LMS issue by how you're describing it but then again I'm not an LMS expert.

"I'm about as frustrated as possible with this and I'm ready to throw the entire LMS in the trash."  At least I'm not the only one . A coworker and myself receive a few calls daily reporting why are they receiving this "Would they like to resume" everytime they have to take a course annually.

Hi Keith and Adam. A great place to start troubleshooting your issues is here:

http://www.articulate.com/blog/9-ways-to-troubleshoot-articulate-lms-issues/

Not sure if this would be relevant, but bookmarking won't work in an AICC environment where the content is not hosted on the same server as the LMS. See:

http://www.articulate.com/support/presenter09/kb/?p=888

Adam. It's entirely possible that the LMS is caching elements of the presentation that indicate the course should not resume. You can fairly easily figure out if your course is actually sending suspend data by enabling the debug log. Instructions on how to do that are here:

http://www.articulate.com/support/presenter09/kb/?p=936

Hi Keith. If you enable the debug on your course, you should also be able to see how the course exits and if it communicates the proper status to the LMS. If it is, then you would want to contact the LMS directly to see if they can troubleshoot things on their end.

Justin,

Thanks for the reply! We've been working with our LMS vendor for three weeks now trying to get this resolved. I've published, tested, republished, and tested so many different ways I can't so straight. At this point we're thinking our communications issue is either a bug in our LMS or it is a cross domain issue with Flash. Since the content is hosted on our server, it may be the cross-domain issue. We're going to update the cross-domain.xml file on our server and see if that works. If not we'll try the solution found here:

http://www.articulate.com/support/presenter09/kb/?cat=3

If neither of those work then the problem must be with our LMS.

Thanks,

Keith

No problem, Keith and good luck!

Also, this is the article about cross domain issues and the workaround:

http://www.articulate.com/support/presenter09/kb/?p=888

Thanks Justin.

I forwarded this information to our IT department to see if this helps them at all.

Thanks again!

In case anyone is following this thread...Our IT department believes that they have found the problem. Not sure why this is happening but some of the Articulate modules were being published incorrectly even though we had the correct settings marked. Meaning we would have the 2 settings in the Player Template under Misc "Prompt to resume" and "When in LMS, ignore Flash cookie" checked sometimes the False/True statement would change and end up being True/False or True/True.

We have noticed one other time when publishing as a ZIP for email that the statement would change as well. So we had to republish the course, without changing the settings at all, and it would be fixed.

So if anyone is having an issue, verify the false/true statement is correct by going into your published files in the data folder and open up the Playerproperties.xml with IE. Then Press Ctrl + F to open up the "Find" tab and search for Resume. This should show up (see image below) and verify it looks like this.

Hi Adam.

Thanks for sharing this!