LMS reporting "undefined" or blanks for some questions

Thanks Debra for the update and please continue to keep us posted here and in your case with Cleo. 

Any updates to this issue?

Hi Allison! This issue is still active and being investigated by our QA Team. I do not have an update to provide at this time.

Hi guys,
Not sure if people are still having these issues, I managed to resolve it on my end. Thought the tests and results might help someone out even though it's not Storyline 1.
I'm running Storyline 2 (update 7) and adding the SCORM to Moodle version 2.6.

Backstory, I had three multiple choice questions in my file. The first question worked but the other two were showing the "undefined" value in the LMS. The only difference were extra characters and symbols in the "undefined" values. I made a test copy of the file, ran a few tests by removing certain characters/symbols and as it turns out, the quotation marks were the culprit.

I slowly added other characters back in (?, ..., $) and they worked no problems as well. It doesn't look like student responses are affected by symbols. Math questions might be more complicated than what I had to deal with, but I would try dialling back the answers to plain text and see if it is still giving the "undefined value".

Some wild guesses about why this might occur:
- LMS doesn't recognise certain characters/symbols when results get passed through
- I may have copied and pasted some hidden formatting from the original Word doc to Storyline.

I've attached a pdf with some before/after shots. Hope this helps
Cheers

Hi Alex! I appreciate you popping in to share your findings and solution. Even if it doesn't help the previous users here, it could help someone searching in the future :)

I'm seeing this behavior in both Articulate Quizmaker and Storyline as well. I've confirmed it with SCORM Cloud and our LMS (Sumtotal). Something in the Articulate code doesn't like an answer that begins with $ or ". The latest updates do not fix this issue.

Hi Robert!

I checked on the case shared above and it appears that the issue is still open with our QA Team. I do not have any updates at this time.

I am also having the same problem when Storyline sent grades to Blackboard and I try to get the grades on BB. I see various fuzzy and random trend on the "undefined" output and check that there are no special symbols. Appreciate if there is any other things which I could try.

Hi Zach,

If there aren't any special symbols in your output, perhaps you're running into a different issue. We'd want to begin by looking at having you test the output in another LMS such as SCORM Cloud as it's an industry standard for LMS testing and this article will walk you through some testing steps.  If the behavior persists there, we'll want to take a look at it, and you can share your .story file here with us. If it works normally there, you'll want to reach out to your LMS team about what could be happening on their end with the reporting of data. 

Aha! Yes, I'd also used spaces to separate the responses from the check boxes/radio buttons. The answer is to select all the responses, delete the space and then use Paragraph - Indentation Before Text to add it back in properly. I found values around 0.05" looked about right.

Glad that worked for you Adam and thanks for coming in to update this thread. 

Was this issue ever resolved? I am still to this day getting Undefined variables in my LMS reports for various questions.

Hi Justin!

Looks like I just responded to a similar question of yours here.

The issue above is related to answers with special characters. Is that the same that you are seeing? 

Yes, we're still seeing this with SumTotal Maestro. We had to stop using %, #, ", etc. in front of the answers.

If we need to use a special character, we create a text box and place it to the left of the option.

Thanks Robert for sharing that option you're using - a just an FYI that responding via email includes your signature here. You're welcome to edit the post to remove that if you wish. 

Thanks for the details Robert, I do not have an update to provide on that issue as it is still in the hands of our QA Team at this time.

I removed the " in front of the answers and now they are defined. Very interesting. This thread was most helpful

Glad to hear it Justin and thanks for the update.

Justin,

Just curious. Which LMS do you use? We have Sumtotal Maestro.

Ah, I see that now. Thanks for pointing that out! Love the new email reply feature.

It's disappointing that this is still an issue 2 years later. I would like to add to this discussion:

An answer/option that begins with these characters will be sent to the LMS as "undefined" in SCORM 1.2 and "null" in SCORM2004:

• A space ( )
• A double-quotation mark (")
• A question mark (?)
• A hyphen (-)
• A dollar sign ($)
• A percentage sign (%)
• A hashtag/pound sign (#)

I can confirm that this is indeed a Storyline 2 issue, as a test project with identical questions/answers built with Captivate does not report "Undefined" in our LMS or SCORM Cloud. Captivate properly converts these special characters to the underscore (_) character:

Captivate

cmi.interactions.4.student_response = _A_Choice_A_with__Quotation_Marks_

Storyline 2

cmi.interactions.4.student_response = undefined

Hoping Articulate finally gets around to fixing this bug, however in the mean-time hopefully  this info helps somebody work-around the bug.

Hi Mike,

Thanks so much for adding your voice here. It’s definitely helpful to understand how many folks are experiencing this bug and how often they encounter it, and that info helps us prioritize our development resources.

I’m really sorry that I can’t make a firm commitment to resolve this problem, but I know this is one that affects quite a few of our customers, so I'm going to advocate for it in our next meeting with the Quality Assurance team. You're in the right place, and we’ll share as much as we can, as soon as we can!

This thread was so useful!! I had a number of questions reporting as 'undefined' to our Moodle LMS. I had put in spaces to create a larger gap between the radio buttons and the answer text, but since removing these and using the indent in the paragraph options instead all the responses are reporting as they should. Happy Monday! 

Glad this helped you out Emma and Happy Monday indeed!