Errors Experienced - Thoughts?

May 09, 2018

Hello Community,

I thought I might put this out there for comment.

We are using Moodle 3.2 as our LMS hosted through Moonami. We have several courses our employees need to complete for annual recurrent training such as ethics, anti-harassment, HIPAA, and Anti-Nepotism/Conflict of Interest. We are a state government agency.

The problems we are experiencing are with the SCORM packages. I am using Articulate 360 to produce materials. We believe it to be a connection issue between our network (state network) and the host for our LMS.

When our employees go in to complete a course module that is a SCORM package then they receive an error that the connection is unstable and the completion status is not recorded. It does not even record how much of the course module the employee completed. So if they leave and come back they are started from the beginning.  Annoying to say the least for a course that is 45 minutes long.

Any thoughts on how to fix this?

2 Replies
Dan Marsden

Hi Scott, 

What people in this forum might not be aware is that the error you refer to comes from Moodle. We made some further improvements to that error in Moodle 3.5 (releases next week) so that the error only appears once instead of repeatedly and a slight adjustment to the timeout value that triggers the message.

in 3.4 and lower versions the SCORM player makes a request for a simple txt file from the web server - if that takes longer than 4 seconds to respond it throws this warning. In 3.5 and higher we adjusted that timing to 10 seconds 

Ideally your server shouldn't be taking 4 seconds (let alone 10 seconds) to respond when requesting a simple txt file, so if that is happening regularly then you should probably take a closer look to see where the bottleneck might be as this may be causing problems with saving of users progress in a SCORM package.

Also - support for Moodle 3.2 ends next week and you should be looking to upgrade to a recent stable supported release. I'd suggest upgrading to 3.5 because it will be a long term support release and improves the SCORM network check.

I'd also recommend you make sure that SCORM standards mode is not enabled on your site - with a 45 min SCORM package I suspect you are hitting the suspend_data limits of the SCORM 1.2 spec. Go to: (admin > plugins > activities > SCORM and find the standards mode checkbox and make sure it is not ticked.)

You might also consider breaking your SCORM package down into smaller chunks - 45min is a long time for someone to sit through a learning package - it would be interesting to see how many of your students complete it in one go and how many complete it in 2 or 3 sessions.

If disabling standards mode doesn't help and learners are still being returned to the beginning of the course there may be other settings you need to change in Articulate or Moodle - Hopefully Moonami support can help you with SCORM settings in Moodle but this FAQ from moodledocs might help as well:
https://docs.moodle.org/en/SCORM_FAQ#Handling_of_Multiple_Attempts

hope that helps!

This discussion is closed. You can start a new discussion or contact Articulate Support.