I have created a quiz using Quizmaker & Presenter 09. I am having issues where the quiz score does not always record. I am wondering if either Quizmaker or Presenter have some type of timeout built into the programs where the quiz will stop working if there is no activity for a period of time.
Once a user logs into my quiz, they can be in the quiz for an unlimited amount of time during the day.
I faced this same problem a couple of years ago. In our case, it had nothing to do with Articulate and everything to do with our LMS. Our LMS would terminate the session after 2hrs. Of course our LMS provider didn't want to tell us this fact for some unknown reason, but once we figured it out we got them to extend this to 5 hrs and we put a note to our learners that if they were going to leave the course for any significant amount of time they should close the window and restart the course as they would be allowed to continue from where they left off.
Charles is exactly right. Your LMS provider is the one in charge of timing out the users. But here's a great plugin from David Burton called the Internet Connection Detection, that essentially alerts users when their connection has been dropped. Though this is not supported by Articulate, it sounds like it may be useful for your needs:
Tonie - we have the same situation with our LMS provider timing out after 90 minutes, There's also the additional issue of bandwidth and losing connection to the LMS at peak times - can be annoying as we're in New Zealand and provider server and the bulk of users are in Australia, the time difference although minimal means that what's peak time in Australia isn't necessarily peak time in NZ!
We can choose to increase the length of time before timing our however for our purposes 90 minutes should generally be enough time.
Additionally, we don't have the option of leaving the quiz then going back in where you left off, as I removed that option from the quizes - leaving that function there meant that users ALWAYS timed out after completing the quiz and going back in to review, regardless of whether they had been in the quiz for less (often wayyyy less) than 90 mins.
Hi Mirren - from Australia to the US to New Zealand and back again! What a global conversation
I didn't try the plugin that Peter provided, altho I may explore it further - we've had a couple of instances of courses timing out too recently, well within the 90 min time frame.
FYI, following on my from original post here, the response I had from our LMS provider was something along the lines of the following...... (and i have seen this referred to here on this site):
Every time a learner does a course in Articulate, the course saves and records details like what page the learner is on and what parts of the page they clicked on. As the learner continues through the different pages through the course or quiz, there is more and more information saved by the course or quiz.
If there is too much "saved information" (the suspend string is too large) then the LMS will not accept this and error/time out. (the suspend string is the technical name for a learner's "saved information".)
You can set Articulate to not keep the saved information (not use the suspend string, ie. unchecking the resume box) and this will mean that the content should work fine however it also means no saved data is kept so if a learner exits the course/content when they come back and launch it again, they have to start from the begining.
They said that an alternative fix would be to cut down the ammount of questions/pages you have in the quiz / course That way the amount of saved data stored is cut down as well.
It did work, and was acceptable(ish) for the initial stand alone quizzes we built, as we wanted users to complete in one go (and estimated time to complete for most was around 45 mins), but for the courses it's not ideal.
6 Replies
Toni,
I faced this same problem a couple of years ago. In our case, it had nothing to do with Articulate and everything to do with our LMS. Our LMS would terminate the session after 2hrs. Of course our LMS provider didn't want to tell us this fact for some unknown reason, but once we figured it out we got them to extend this to 5 hrs and we put a note to our learners that if they were going to leave the course for any significant amount of time they should close the window and restart the course as they would be allowed to continue from where they left off.
Welcome to Heroes, Toni!
Charles is exactly right. Your LMS provider is the one in charge of timing out the users. But here's a great plugin from David Burton called the Internet Connection Detection, that essentially alerts users when their connection has been dropped. Though this is not supported by Articulate, it sounds like it may be useful for your needs:
http://www.builtbyburton.com/?p=910
Is that helpful?
Hi - this is handy thanks Peter.
Tonie - we have the same situation with our LMS provider timing out after 90 minutes, There's also the additional issue of bandwidth and losing connection to the LMS at peak times - can be annoying as we're in New Zealand and provider server and the bulk of users are in Australia, the time difference although minimal means that what's peak time in Australia isn't necessarily peak time in NZ!
We can choose to increase the length of time before timing our however for our purposes 90 minutes should generally be enough time.
Additionally, we don't have the option of leaving the quiz then going back in where you left off, as I removed that option from the quizes - leaving that function there meant that users ALWAYS timed out after completing the quiz and going back in to review, regardless of whether they had been in the quiz for less (often wayyyy less) than 90 mins.
Hi Sarah - fancy seeing you here!
We are having a problem with a quiz timing out well under the 90 mins set by the LMS.
We do have it set to allow users to leave the quiz and come back later which is an option we would like to keep for this particular quiz.
Is there any solution to this issue?!?
Many thanks....
Hi Mirren - from Australia to the US to New Zealand and back again! What a global conversation
I didn't try the plugin that Peter provided, altho I may explore it further - we've had a couple of instances of courses timing out too recently, well within the 90 min time frame.
FYI, following on my from original post here, the response I had from our LMS provider was something along the lines of the following...... (and i have seen this referred to here on this site):
Every time a learner does a course in Articulate, the course saves and records details like what page the learner is on and what parts of the page they clicked on. As the learner continues through the different pages through the course or quiz, there is more and more information saved by the course or quiz.
If there is too much "saved information" (the suspend string is too large) then the LMS will not accept this and error/time out. (the suspend string is the technical name for a learner's "saved information".)
You can set Articulate to not keep the saved information (not use the suspend string, ie. unchecking the resume box) and this will mean that the content should work fine however it also means no saved data is kept so if a learner exits the course/content when they come back and launch it again, they have to start from the begining.
They said that an alternative fix would be to cut down the ammount of questions/pages you have in the quiz / course That way the amount of saved data stored is cut down as well.
It did work, and was acceptable(ish) for the initial stand alone quizzes we built, as we wanted users to complete in one go (and estimated time to complete for most was around 45 mins), but for the courses it's not ideal.
Hmm. Please excuse the tiny writing. Not sure what I did there.
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