FORCED_COMMIT_TIME value of 60000 (60k)

Hello,
I'm the original poster of this discussion thread.  Obviously things have moved on quite a bit from when I posted it four years ago.

However, we've started noticing that Storyline 360 (latest versions) are no longer setting FORCED_COMMIT_TIME to 60000 by default but to 0 (which means no auto-commit).  Furthermore, the location of this configuration option has moved from "configuration.js" to "lms/scormdriver.js".

Is there any announcement on these changes that I can read up on?  I'm particularly interested in knowing why an auto-commit has been switched off by default (as we're going to need to manually set this back to 60000 after each publish).

Note: We're publishing to SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004 and to "html5 only".

Thanks, Chris

Hi Chris!

Thanks for updating us! I'd like for our Support Engineers to work with you so that we can investigate further. I've just opened a case on your behalf and sent over a brief email. You'll hear from our team shortly!

Thanks

I'm with you Chris! The switch from SCORMFunctions.js to scormdriver.js is really throwing us for a loop. The new scormdriver.js is the same code base that is used for Articulate Rise. When I expressed dismay over the lack of functionality for the FORCED_COMMIT_TIME variable in the Rise code base, it sounded to me like there was no remediation planned. But hopefully if it gets fixed for Storyline, the fix can be translated to Rise as well.

This is a major issue for our company with over 200,000 employees who are now faced with a greater likelihood that their progress through a course may be lost if there is a network error. And we have over 200 Storyline developers who are producing projects .

Tuesday morning news, all! 🗞

A hotfix for Storyline 360 is ready: We fixed the issue where the FORCED_COMMIT_TIME variable in the scormdriver.js file defaulted to a value of 0 in the previous update, preventing courses from sending 'keep alive' messages to an LMS to keep learners' sessions from timing out. This update restores the default value of 60000, which sends a 'keep alive' message to the LMS every 60 seconds.

• Check out the release notes for more details
• Follow these steps to see all the latest fixes

Thank you for bringing this up, and let us know if you have any questions! 

Thanks Kate.  That's great news.

Please note however that 60000 equates to 1 minute not 10 minutes (as value is in milliseconds, not centiseconds).  (This info is also incorrect in their change log)

You're right and good catch, Chris!

Our team corrected the version history, and I'll update my previous post to reflect that. Thank you!

Hi there

Are there any plans to add such a fix/functionality for Rise?

Or is there a reason that the scorm commit and keep-alive messages are different between StoryLine and Rise?

The below was posted in this thread a year ago "Our team found that Rise 360 courses are not sending keep-alive messages to the LMS, even if the FORCED_COMMIT_TIME variable is changed the value from 0 to 60000." is this seen as a bug?

Hi Mike! Thanks for checking in on this. This is not a bug, but rather just a difference in the way Storyline 360 and Rise 360 communicate with your LMS. Rise 360 sends a keep-alive message to your LMS when you navigate to each lesson.

Does your course have long-running lessons that are causing learners to time out? If so, would you mind if we had a look at your course? If that works for you, you can send the LMS output file to us privately here.

Hi Alyssa, thanks for responding, sorry I forget to check back on this thread.

Yes we have some long lessons, and seem to have a bit of a history of users losing progress across many of our Rise courses, usually when they try to complete over a number of sittings. This has become more prevalent recently as we have released a longer video based course, that if users do the right thing and watch everything, need to do over a number of sittings.

The course works fine for me and "most" users on Chrome and Firefox, progress is saved automatically as expected. On IE11 tho (which sadly is still my departments default browser) progress is only saved by the use of the "exit course" button in Rise or the "save and close" button in our LMS, i have been able to reproduce this error. This has occurred for courses published as SCORM 1.2 and also SCORM 2004 v3 - which we advised to use for Rise courses due to SCORM 1.2's lower data-suspend value.

I raised a case and provided the course to Articulate, and received the response that as it works on SCORM cloud then the course is fine. I would assume our LMS (Learning Suite, from IMC multimedia) isnt as forgiving as SCORM cloud (which seems fairly common across the threads i read here) and I have also raised a ticket with IMC for assistance. Initially they advised the below, which is why i have been trying to read up on scorm_commit.

"We suggest that Scorm WBT takes care, that at least the critical data, such as score raw, lesson status, completion status and success status are set in the session, immediatelly after they have changed. The data should also be commited at that point (SCORM commit). I´m not sure, at what point of the session or how often your content currently transmits the scorm data. This is completely up to the content tool. It should be commited at least periodically, and NOT only at the end/closing of the session."

FWIW i feel the issue is somewhere between our LMS, our default browser being IE11, and a little bit Rise as we not see these issues with StoryLine.

Cheers

Mike Z

Hi Mike!

Thank you for adding these details! I see that you were working with my teammate, Phil. Our Support Engineers are available in a support case if you need additional help!

Hi everyone! Our team has made improvements to the FORCED_COMMIT_TIME variable in Rise 360. Newly exported Rise 360 courses exported using SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004, or AICC will communicate with the LMS every 60 seconds, as well as when you navigate to each new lesson. This change doesn't apply to courses exported with xAPI or cmi5.

Please let me know if you have any questions about this enhancement!