250 Character Limit
Jun 14, 2011
Hello!
I have a problem that I hope the wonderful community here can help me with. I'm grappling with this issue:
http://www.articulate.com/support/quizmaker09/kb/?p=871
I am using Articulate to publish content, but I want to use questions (and answer choices) that are over 250 characters. The problem in the KB article above spells out the problem: whenever there is a question (or question answer choice) over 250 characters, that question is ignored by our LMS. The question and its responses do NOT get recorded in the database, since nothing is sent by Articulate to it.
Aside from counting characters, *are there any other ways around this problem*?
I'm thinking about publishing the quiz as a Word document, and building a custom application to parse the question text and choices. That way, the LMS can ignore that bit of the interaction. This solution, sadly, doesn't help the fact that learner response don't get recorded.
Has anyone come up with another solution for this problem? Has Articulate?
5 Replies
Hi Edmund and welcome to Heroes! Since the character limit is imposed by the standard, there really isn't a simple way to do this. The best course of action would be to, as the article states, place some of the question in a standalone text box or simply reduce the question text to 250 characters.
If you publish the quiz for Word, it should be pretty easy to see what questions exceed the 250 character count in Microsoft Word.
Justin,
Thanks for the quick reply. Do you know if Articulate have plans to address the issue in some way in the next release, or in an update to Studio '09? Perhaps a character counter or "SCORM compatibility checker" would help to alleviate the stress caused by this issue.
Not all LMS implementations adhere to character limits imposed by the spec that they are using. If we did limit that, we would then hear back from folks whose LMS uses the same standard but don't impose the character limit. So we could consider doing something in the future, but right now it's a bit of a damned if you do and damned if you don't and we opted for the don't.
Justin,
That's helpful context. You said, "Not all LMS implementations adhere to character limits imposed by the spec that they are using." Does that mean that I could modify my SCORM interpreter to ignore the 250 character limit?
In addition, I've found that when the 250 character limit is broken, Articulate doesn't send any data to the LMS. How might another LMS get around this problem, if the data isn't sent to begin with?
Thanks again!
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