Everything we know about Cornerstone on Demand and Storyline!
Sep 04, 2013
I thought I would start a thread about Cornerstone on Demand so there's a central place for people to read and add to. There seems to be a dearth of information about how CSOD and Storyline interact with each other as well as the unresolved issues surrounding it. I've spent many hours scouring the web and speaking with Cornerstone trying to find a solution. Hopefully this thread will serve as a resource for others going forward.
On a side note, I love Articulate Storyline. I started with Adobe Captivate with limited success. It was a very steep learning curve, but I was able to get some basic functionality out of it. I tested out Storyline with it's 30 day trial, and I will say that time-to-effectiveness was drastically reduced. It really IS like using powerpoint. Granted there is less complex functionality and interactions available than Captivate, but so far it's given me everything I've needed to use. The benefit is that the learning curve is much less steep too. Think of it as the difference between iMovie and Final Cut Pro. The latter can do some crazy effects, but the former gives you 90% of what you need and can get you comfortable in 1/4 of the time.
It's nice to have a properly-working content creation tool when you're in an LMS like Cornerstone. I have enough trouble in CSOD as it is.
So some of the nuggets of wisdom that I've found are :
- Cornerstone does not track SCORM 1.2 content properly. You cannot pull a lot of the reports if they are not in SCORM 2004 format. You don't have the option to select that course in the reports.
- If you export into SCORM 2004, there will be an extra section on the left with text links to the module. This takes up 30% of the screen, and on smaller laptop screens may crowd out the module window. Cornerstone says this is a Storyline exporting settings issue. I couldn't find any settings that shows/hides that section. The workaround is to resize the module to the screen, which doesn't get rid of the section, but at least fits the module.
- When reporting, you can get the completion status for a course based on quiz result or last slide viewed. You can also get a final grade for course. Storyline passes the results information for each question (including short answer) but you cannot pull a list of the answers for an individual. Therefore, it may not be advisable to administer any testing where you'll need to review individual answers
- You can get a list of aggregate answers for a module. e.g. I can see how 100 employees answered this multiple choice question. This is helpful to determine if learners are absorbing the course information correctly.
- Web objects (such as websites, or links to sharepoint documents) work in modules if your IT has added csod.com to the trusted sites
- Popup windows that open up the articulate module in CSOD will work if you add csod.com to the allowed list for popup blockers. Your IT dept can also add this to everyone's computer. Otherwise when learners click the "launch" button, the module does not show up.
I'll post more as I think or find them, but feel free to add to this list!
906 Replies
This document from Cornerstone also shares some suggestions for testing suspend_data file size. Justin's suggestion of debug mode seems sound, but does that indicate file size of communication to LMS? Tried running in SCORM Cloud as well and am not able to find those number either.
I suppose it's worth noting that the four courses we have that appear to exceed the 64KB limit are all SL2 courses or older, so maybe a republish/update in SL360 is in order?
Hi Folks - I wanted to add an update with the only solution we have to date - 1 Cornerstone has not responded with the specific information regarding why or how this course exceeded the message limit. 2 - the client has limited ability to research it on their own and I am a lowly 3rd party supplier - with no authority to reach into their system to search on my own - I have only been tasked with fix the course so it works. (PS neither articulate nor I can get the message limit to exceed in our tests)
This is by no means the largest, longest or most media rich course we have developed for this client - but it is a lengthy course and turning off resume playback or dividing the course into smaller segments is NOT an option.
But the mantra is fix the course!
We have for the time being implemented this fabulous and off books suggestion (found posted on here under another thread:
Shout out to David Hansen: https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/storyline-suspend-data-compression
Are these issues still persistent with Cornerstone? If so, any tips for completion. We're having issues with Storyline 360 marking complete as SCORM 1.2 in Cornerstone.
Hi Heather,
To clarify, is the problem that SCORM 1.2 courses built in Storyline are having problems completing in Cornerstone?
Yes. That's correct. I'm wondering if publishing to SCORM 2004 or AICC will fix the issue for our client.
Not sure if the structure of your course, but we had a similar issue recently and discovered that the order of actions on our final page caused the issue.
Final Page had a button to click "Click Button to Exit Course". Its associated actions were "Exit Course" followed by "Complete Course as Completed/Passed".
Simply adjusting the order of those two actions fixed the issue in Cornerstone. This was published in SCORM 1.2
If you don't have a button to close the course out, I would consider it. Closing the browser window to exit a course will sometimes interrupt the completion call to CSOD.
Based on the recent information regarding the Chrome 80 upgrade, I would avoid publishing anything in AICC.
Thanks, Robert. This was helpful. I was able to get Completion recorded during testing in SCORM Cloud after working with Articulate Support. I did add the layer for the Exit option to close the window as well. Do you know if there is a way to record completion and a grade with the Complete Button? I've not been successful with both statuses in SCORM cloud. I was able to setup completion in my own LMS with the activity completion setting in my LMS and the grade was sent to the grade report in the LMS. However, my client uses Cornerstone and cannot get the same results. Any thoughts you could share would be appreciated.
Hi Heather -
We haven't seen completion issues with Storyline content in Cornerstone. We have some courses published to SCORM 1.2 but have moved to SCORM 2004 and Tin Can API for most recent published versions.
I try to avoid chaining completion to a button wherever possible. Especially when this is closely followed by an exit action.
You might try adding your complete course trigger when the timeline starts on your completion slide and leaving the exit action on your button. This would send a complete course trigger with plenty of time to spare for the exit.
Also, I think the complete course trigger will only send your completion status. It won't send a score. If you want to control the score and status reporting, I've had good luck with a Javascript trigger.
FYI - If you switched the compatibility mode Will mentioned off for everyone in content launching preferences, this setting will only apply to newly uploaded online training courses. Courses published prior to that system preferences change will still have the old compatibility setting. To change those, you would need to go into the catalog and change the drop down for each course.
Courses I've published recently (the past week or so) are receiving 404 error not found errors when I complete them and close the course. This is not happening to courses I published and uploaded to CSOD previously, just the ones published recently. I am publishing in SCORM 2004, 3rd edition but it also occurred in 2nd edition and in SCORM 2.1.
The 404 error is in the windows that is left behind that usually says you can close this window. I've tested in both Firefox and Chrome so far. I've also tested in both Production (where I first saw it) and Pilot. What s weird is that it is sending the completion data back fine and the course is showing as complete. I don't get any errors on SCORM cloud either.
Any ideas? Has there been anything in a recent Storyline 360 update that might be causing this? Anyone experiencing this?
It's not Cornerstone. There is an error in the code of the latest release of Storyline javascript that tries to open a page in the wrong directory when you exit. See this discussion: https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/exit-button-on-storyline-player-not-working
Thank you, Will! That article is helpful. I'm trying the workarounds now. Good to know I'm not going crazy!
Hi, I just found this thread. I am hoping someone here can help me.
I am new to Rise, Storyline and Cornerstone. I am running into issues when I try to add a Storyline block in Rise. It looks like Cornerstone does not support SWF files and the Storyline block is a SWF file.
What do you do? Are you able to add Storyline blocks in Rise and then Cornerstone?
Are you able to add Storyline courses to Cornerstone?
Thank you
I was able use a Storyline module in Rise and then publish it in Cornerstone. Have you tried switching your Storyline course to the Modern Player (HTML5 only) and then publishing to Articulate Review?
Does anyone have a method for coercing Cornerstone to do a full replace of files when you use the Modify option for updating an Online Course?
Caveat: I don't want to reversion the course. The course I am updating is in a curriculum assigned to 9000 people, and probably 500 have been removed. We have found that if you Reversion a course, it causes the curriculum to update, which then reassigned the curriculum to everyone who was removed. So our only option is to use Modify, but it seems so impossible to tell if it actually works. I just want to wipe out all the files and start over.
Maybe it's just a coincidence, but I think Modifying the course with the version 2 zip file once, and then Modifying the course with the same version 2 zip file once more for good measure seems to have done the trick!
We ran into situations where Cornerstone's 'MODIFY CONTENT' feature was inconsistent. It's the safe option, but the course doesn't update in a timely manner. I was disappointed that it didn't work well.
However, with that being said, we reversion as needed without running into the problems you mention.
For live courses with existing completions, we select 'Completed Equivalency' and then check 'Not Started' and 'In-Progress' so that people who have completed previous VERSIONS of the course don't have to retake the course.
Refreshing the user list will show you which learners will be re-registered for the updated/versioned course.
We also check "Completed" status. We want those that have completed the previous version to have access to the new version. Since "Completed Equivalent" is chosen they are not required to retake the course, but if they choose to revisit the course and "Launch" they will be seeing the most up to date content.
Every time we reversion a course that also lives in a curriculum this happens:
It may be that this only happens with dynamically assigned curriculula.
Morning! I'm curious if anyone has had an issue with Storyline modules having missing text characters when uploaded to CS. I believe we have narrowed the issue to Internet Explorer only, but still unsure how to address the issue. Spacing and missing characters are both an issue. (trying to include images of both below)
Hi Holly - There is an issue with IE that can appear if web fonts are blocked by policy or browser configuration. Hitting F12 then going to the Console might indicate this is what's going on in this case.
A few of us have lobbied for a fix to this issue. There is a workaround but it requires opening up the CSS in the published output and carefully adding a fallback font common to Windows machines. This workaround will improve the issue but isn't guaranteed to fix the font issue 100%.
What Steve said plus here’s another thread specifically about this: https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/letters-t-and-f-going-missing-in-storyline-360-for-small-population-of-users
Thanks Steve!
Perfect, thanks Will!!