Bloated suspend_data SCORM 1.2

Feb 06, 2014

Is there any interactions (free form) in particular that bloat the suspend data?

I have 136 slide course and which I need to force resume but course is consistently exceeding the 4096 character SCORM 1.2 suspend_data limit.

I first thought the course was corrupt so I cut and paste the slides into a fresh project but still exceeds the limit.

The course does have 7 section each with between 3 and 9 free form interaction questions that are using a result slide. I have reduced the variables and to be honest there's not that many. Have also set as many slides as possible to reset to initial state.

I don't think this is a particularly big course, am I missing something?

Any help greatly appreciated

7 Replies
Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi James,

The suspend data isn't human readable, and I don't know of any particularly "large" interactions that are known issues for suspend data.  Do you need to use SCORM 1.2? If not, you may want to look at the other options listed here which have higher suspend data limits or you'll need to reduce the number of slides until the suspend data works as expected.

James  Marshall

Hi Ashley,

Thanks for getting back to me, yes we are tied to scorm 1.2,  we have also looked at all the options (in the above post) we have decided to split the course up so we've worked around the issue, just seems to me to be generating a large amount of data for the number of interactions etc in the course.

Thanks again James

James  Marshall

Hi Ashley,

Maybe I should start a post for this Ashley but do you know off hand how you remove the auto generated variables from a course that are added when you add a result slide? e.g Result.PassPercent, Result.PassPercentage, and so on. When they are no longer required there doesn't seem to be a way to delete? Any ideas?

Many Thanks James

Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard

Hi James, 

Thanks for the update and I'm glad you will be able to split your course. If your curious about the data that is being sent to your LMS you could enable LMS debug mode and do some further investigation. 

There isn't a way to delete the variables that are automatically created when you insert a results slide, but you are able to update the on-screen text boxes that reference these variables and therefore delete them from the users view.

Click in the relevant text box to edit the text and delete the variable reference - just make sure that you retain the correct formatting for the variable you do want to be displayed i.e. %VARIABLE NAME%

With that being said, I've heard other users have put in a feature request for the ability to delete them. 

Trevor White-Miller

Wanted to post this for information only.

Phil's suggestion to set slldes to initial state works.

I had a number of courses where the suspend data character length was very close to the limit for SCORM  1.2. I changed all the slides with 'Automatic Decide' to 'Initial State' just leaving a few as Saved State.  For one particular course the Suspend Data reduction was 3,800 characters down to 420 characters.

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