Articulate Storyline Update 5 just made "it" worse

Did the problems exist with prior versions of Storyline?  Are the courses published as SCORM or AICC?  What LMS do you use?  Do they crash at the same place?  Does it only crash with video, images, or audio?  Do they fail for other users launching them from the LMS?  Does your browser freeze with any other type of page?

I don't mean to bombard you with questions, even though I did.  These are some of the troubleshooting that we go through to test content with the LMS and try to narrow down the issue.  We have often found issues tied to particular users (access rights, etc.) or particular machines (memory limitations) or sometimes location specific (different country from web server location).

I have not experienced these issues with Storyline 5 but I may not have published a course similar to yours.

No, please bombard away!   I think when we figure what is going on it will be something I have done to cause a conflict.  Here are the answers to your questions.

Did the problems exist with prior versions of Storyline?

Yes, I was getting numerous complaints from students running the program on different computers.

Are the courses published as SCORM or AICC?

SCORM

What LMS do you use?

TargetSolutions

Do they crash at the same place?

No, they are freezing and causing the browser to close. When you restart the course it does remember where you left off.

Does it only crash with video, images, or audio?

It has not happened on any video files that I know of. It is either a slide with text (with or without animation) or a test question.

Do they fail for other users launching them from the LMS?

Yes

Does your browser freeze with any other type of page?

No

This happens across operating systems. I believe it is something I have done and not necessarily the Articulate Storyline program.  An Articulate staff member just tested one of my files to the Storyline Cloud and it ran correctly.  I realized it happened to be one of the files I have not uploaded via SCORM.  I am going to ask them to look at my other two and see if there are any glaring mistakes I have made.  I believe the problem is going to be how I am using scenes or something to do with the quizzes I have created.

Why did I say that Update 5 made the problems worse?  I originally contacted Articulate support on January 28, the day after update 5 release, and of course they asked me if I had updated my software.  When I went to look at the update information page it looked as if the updates addressed every problem I was having.  My IT department handled the update and I republished and uploaded my current courses.  After I replaced the files I started getting many more reports of the programs freezing.

I looked at one of my courses and realized that I had everything in ome scene including the quiz.  I created a new scene and move the quiz into that scene.  I then republished the file as a SCORM and uploaded it to my LMS.  I then ran the course a couple of times with some improvement.  The main scene/body of the course ran without freezing up.  It ran faster and did not hesitate like the previous files. Once I moved out of the main scene and into the quiz scene it froze on the first slide and I had to restart.  I was able to get it to run at least once without freezing but it definitely ran slower and felt like it was not running at a consistent speed. 

I too am getting apparently random freezing issues on some screens.  Actually not sure if freezing is technically accurate, what happens is that after transitioning to the next slide sometimes the course will just do nothing.  The page will display either all of the content, some of the content or none of the content and become unresponsive to any clicks with the mouse.  After a period of time which can range from 2 minutes to 30 minutes the slide will become responsive again.  Most of the course is fine and these apparently random issues will occur without notice about 4 or 5 times during the course.  I have produced four separate courses since the Update 5 and this occurs on all 4 of them. I have courses on the same Kalidus LMS developed with earlier versions of Storyline all of which do not have this issue.

I am doing a standard publish in SCORM 1.2 Passed/Failed reporting.  The issue seems to affect any type of slide including assessment slides at random.  My courses are not particularly technical and uses simple javascript for email and printing and not more than 4 o5 layers on some screens.

Our business network uses Internet Explorer 8

Flash Player 9 or 10

Kalidus LMS

Grateful for any suggestions advice.

Joe

Hi Joe,

Have you tested the course out at SCORM Cloud as well to help narrow down if it's update 5 specifically or something with this update and/or your LMS? Also per the viewing requirements here, you'll want to use Flash 10 or later. 

Hi Ashley

Thanks for the help.  I have tested all of the courses in SCORM Cloud and they seem to work just fine there. Our Kalidus LMS uses Flash player up to version 10.2 so should be sufficient.  It seems to be a loss of communication or at least an extremely slow communication between the learners PC and the LMS when this issues occurs.  The link is made eventually but the issue does mean that I cannot use any of the courses in the live catalogue.  I have even tried publishing in SCORM 2004 3rd Edition but same issue.  I normally use the Passed/Incomplete reporting settings but on all of these four courses I have used the Passed/Failed setting.  Wondering if that might be the issue.

Hi Joe,

When you say up to version 10.2, you mean there could be users on Flash 9? You'll want to request those users update their Flash player as well. Since the course works at SCORM Cloud, you'll want to connect with your LMS team regarding the behavior. If you'd like to take a look at the data being passed back and forth you could also enable the LMS debug mode as described here and share that information with your LMS team. 

Ashley

Thank you for the debug tip.  I tested the courses again on SCPRM Cloud sing the debug setting and I noticed some strange behaviour that might be causing the issues.  I created all of these courses by saving an earlier course with a new name (the name of the new course). I then just adjusted the new course as required by adding deleting content etc.  I did not delete the variables from the original course in these new course templates and in fact I reused many of them.  What seems to be happening is that email addresses and some wording from the old courses seems to be finding its way into the new communication with the LMS each time a new screen is opened (i.e. when the user presses continue to a new screen).  It does not do this when continuing to a layer.

So, I went through the laborious process of deleting unused variables and that did not fix the issue.  So I deleted all the reused variables and javascript and references to al variables that were displaying this behaviour.  That does seem to have rectified what is being communicated between the course and the LMS causing the errors.  I don't know if it has fixed the latency issue since I need to test that on the business LMS.  The debug log also highlighted an error SCORM 405 and a message stating that the number of characters was 4096 and some of the slides had exceeded that.  So, I changed the configuration.js file to AUTO, as in auto select the SCORM version and that has at least rectified this on the SCORM Cloud.  I will test on our business machines and update you later.

Joe

Thanks Joe for the additional testing and updates - I'm glad you were able to rectify a lot of the variable issues. You mentioned the total characters for your SCORM course, and it made me think of the data limits within SCORM 1.2, as that's the total character count. Although Storyline compresses suspend data, which means it isn't likely you'll exceed the suspend data limits imposed by some LMSs, it's possible that you have based on how much content is being communicated back and forth from your course. 

If you have a large course that does exceed suspend data limits, here are some suggestions for correcting it:

• Disable the resume feature in Storyline.
• Reduce the number of slides until the resume feature works as expected. The limit will vary, depending on a variety of factors. You'll need to test your content in your LMS to verify.
• Republish your course for SCORM 2004 3rd Edition or 4th Edition, both of which support much longer suspend data.

Thank you Ashley.  I think I may have asked a similar question just now in the Forum, (oops).  Much appreciated and I'll give it all a try.

Joe

Hi Joe,

Is this the other thread you were talking about - no worries on a double post, as it looks like Phil helped you out there too! 

Thanks Ashley much appreciated.  Looks like the limit for the number of Storyline slides (at least for us) is about 45, which is not really suitable or practical for our e-learning courses.  We didn't have this problem prior to Update 5.  Is there a way to revert back to Update 4?

Hi there Joe,

Ashley's out of the office today. I just wanted to stop by and see if I could assist with your most recent question. 

It would actually help us out if we could confirm that the issue you're running into exists in only Update 5, and not Update 4.

You may revert back to Update 4, which can be downloaded here.

Hi Christine

Thank you for the link, I haven't used it yet while still trying other things.

A quick update to this long thread.  I completely rewrote the courses from scratch using the update 5 version and published in SCORM 2004 3rd Edition which is supported by the Kallidus LMS.  Low and behold the freezing issue remained as before, sporadic and persistent.  Nothing else has changed the client uses Internet Explorer 8 on a secure government intranet.  I copied the quick link to the course provided by the LMS administrator and copied it into Google Chrome version 31.0.1650.63 which is not quite the latest version and wam bam all the courses work fine persistently.  The problem is that most of the thousands of users who use the LMS do not have access to Chrome and are forced to use IE8 and therein lies the problem.

Does anyone know what in IE8 may be causing the issue?  How can I get round it.  Can a button on the LMS be pressed or a setting altered? 

Grateful for any suggestions please.

Thanks

Joe

We have done further testing and noticed the following:

In IE8 using Kallidus LMS all courses published in Storyline Update 5 load correctly but in every course after the user clicks the next button to go the second page the course freezes and cannot be released.  After restarting it the usual LMS error message appears informing the user that he cannot continue because the previous session is still running.  After acknowledging this message and restarting the course it works perfectly well on each and every slide in each and every course.

This is not acceptable since I cannot expect hundreds of delegates to go through that process every tie they want to learn something.  Our LMS admin team are contacting Kallidus to see if they are aware of the issue and a fix.  I will keep you posted.  All courses work fine when opened in Google Chrome so I'm guessing the issue is either with the LMS and IE8 or just with IE8 security settings.  But I have published Storyline courses in all previous versions and they all worked just fine on the LMS.

I'm pulling my hair out (and I don't have much).  Any ideas please anyone.

Joe

Hi Joe,

Thanks for the update and further troubleshooting information. To help narrow down where the issue is occurring, you may also want to test the same course loaded up to SCORM Cloud, which is an industry standard testing method for SCORM content and see how that version behaves in IE8. If it works as expected that'll help you narrow it down to the LMS. Next, I see Christine previously provided you with a link to access Update 4, since you mentioned it's only occurring with Update 5. I'd try to publish the same course again using Update 4 and see how that version behaves on IE8 with SCORM Cloud and Kallidus - this will help you determine if there were some overall IE8 update/security issues or if it's the difference between Storyline update 4 and update 5. 

Please let us know how everything behaves after testing under those scenarios.