Completion Failure to Capture & Re-entry problems

Apr 23, 2014

Peter Fiackos
By Peter Fiackos

I am having two problems with courses that I built using Storyline:

Background:   The courses were built with a hub and spoke approach in which the learner could go to the 8 various course segments in the order in which they chose as opposed to a linear approach.  Each segment presents information and has a short quiz/assessment.  To successfully complete the course, the learner must complete all sections with a final cumulative grade of 70% or greater.  The concept has been used before for other training and I copied and updated a previous course with the new content in the construction in order to re-use something found to be effective.

Problems:

1.  The courses are housed on our Moodle 2.6 LMS hosted internally.  While many students complete the course without problem, we are having a 5-10% occurrence of the system not properly capturing the grade/completion into the LMS when the learner finishes all segments with a passing grade and exits.  I have placed the courses on SCORM cloud and could not replicate the problem there.

2.  When a learner goes in and takes a portion of the course and then leaves, when they return to finish later, they are often returned to the wrong location and some of their work has been lost by the course.  When I placed the course on SCORM cloud, I was able to replicate the occurrence.  In fact, I went through and completed the course in the cloud with a passing grade, but when I returned to the course and chose to return to where I left off, instead of returning to the final results page, the course took me to the middle of a quiz that I had already completed, which I finished only to find that that section and two others had been lost from the course as if I had not finished the course.

Obviously, at this point, I am feeling very frustrated and cannot figure out whether the problem lies in the SCORM package, the Storyline course, or a setting in the Moodle 2.6 LMS.  Any help on this issue would be MUCH appreciated as I have a lot of people depending on receiving credit for their online learning content completion.

Pete Fiackos

5 Replies
Christine Hendrickson
10 years ago04/23/14 at 4:46 pm (UTC)

Hi Pete,

Sorry for the frustration. Hopefully we can find out what's happening. 

For the first issue, are you able to connect any common threads with the learners that are experiencing incomplete/incorrect reports? Are they using the same web browser(s)? 

Also, when the course was uploaded, did it overwrite an existing course on the LMS? If so, it may be a caching issue. Have learners clear their cache and see if that helps. If it does not, it may help to upload a renamed version for testing so that the project in the LMS is assigned a new URL. 

The second issue sounds strange and there's obviously an issue with resuming - but I'm not certain if that's an issue with the course or not at this point. Are you able to share the .STORY file here, or privately, for testing?

Thanks!

Peter Fiackos
10 years ago04/24/14 at 7:10 am (UTC)

Christine,

Thanks for lending a hand on this.  In working with the techs at Scorm Cloud, I was able to track down a possible cause for the bookmarking/re-entry issue.  Because we use a Moodle based system for our LMS, and Moodle only works with Scorm 1.2, the problem is that Storyline uses suspended data for the bookmarking mechanism.  In Scorm 1.2, this suspended data is limited to 4096 characters.  However, in scorm cloud I had the option of adjusting the suspended data space from 4096 to 64,000 and this corrected the problem.  The question that I have now is how do I change this setting in a scorm 1.2 package created with Storyline? 

In regards to the failure to capture in the LMS, and to answer your questions:  There does not seem to be a common threads.  The learners are using various browsers.  Additionally, this was a brand new course and there was no overwriting involved.

Any further thoughts or advice?

Pete

Christine Hendrickson
10 years ago04/24/14 at 11:08 am (UTC)

Hi Pete,

Thanks for getting back to me! I'm glad you were able to get this information, as it seems to be quite understandable now for the resume issue. 

I wanted to share some information that may help with the limitations:

To overcome the unfortunate limits imposed by earlier versions of SCORM, Storyline compresses suspend data. As a result, you probably won't exceed the threshold, even if your LMS imposes one.

Note: Because suspend data is compressed to allow for more robust storage, the suspend_data string in an LMS debug log isn't human-readable. That is, you won't be able to decipher it.

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.

For the scoring issue, it may help to reach out to Moodle for assistance. If you're unable to reproduce the issue using another server, it may be specific to those learners accounts, or the reporting in the LMS. If I were to test it on my end, I would also use SCORM Cloud for testing. I'm still happy to do so, but it's difficult to say whether or not I'd see the same issues reported by your learners. 

Please let me know if you have any questions, or if you'd like me to take a look at the project. 

Thanks!

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