Media heavy course crashing.

Jan 22, 2019

Kevin Fox
By Kevin Fox

Hi There,

I am hoping someone will be able to advise me on an issue I have encountered. I am tasked with re-designing a course we currently deliver as the current format appears to be problematic.

The course is currently loaded directly onto a group of laptops which are then transported around specific locations as the staff must take the course under test environment with an invigilator. This is necessary as not all of the staff sitting have access to our LMS.

The problem we are having is the course in question which was designed on Storyline 2 has a large media content which appears to cause it to encounter crashing issues when running, when the course was designed in house and previewed on the office systems it worked fine so I assume the issue is with the laptops themselves. I am looking to make a business case to get updated laptops but in case this is not accepted I was wondering if anyone had any other suggestions?

Currently all the mp4 files are published within the course itself so I was thinking about the possibility of hosting the videos on a media server and just embedding a link but there is some doubt within the team as to whether that would alleviate the issue.

Any help from the community in this area is greatly appreciated.

Thanks

Kevin

5 Replies
Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard
over 5 years ago01/22/19 at 9:58 pm (UTC)

Hi Kevin, 

I have a few questions to help narrow this down, and then, I can point you in the right direction!

  • You shared it's loaded directly onto the laptops, do you use the CD published output to install it there, or another option? 
  • What update of Storyline were the courses published with? You can see the current update you're using by going to the "Help" Tab -> "About Articulate Storyline."
  • Do the courses crash for learners in the same spot, or inconsistently throughout the course?
  • Is the course launched in a browser, and what browser are they using? Do you know the version number and if Flash is enabled? 
  • How large is the course (i.e., number of slides, published output file size, etc.)? 

Let me know as much as you can and we'll figure out from there some next steps! 

P.S. - Thanks for teaching me a new word. Invigilator, had to look that one up! 

Kevin Fox
over 5 years ago01/23/19 at 10:51 am (UTC)

Hi Ashley, 

Thanks for your reply, to answer your questions.

  • The course was published to CD
  • The version of Storyline 2 used was version 13 I believe but not 100% as was created by my colleague back in Oct 2017
  • The course appears to crash in the same area but not always the same video ( I wasn't suere if the way the course was built added to this as there has been multiple layers used at times with videos contained on each layer)
  • The browser used is IE version 11.0.9600.18792IC and it is flash enabled version 23.0.0.162
  • The course was originally 238MB consisting of 82 Slides (we did however split into 5 parts of smaller slides last year as a result of conversations with yourselves case Ref  #01111229)

As mentioned in my answers there was already in depth discussions last year regarding the issues with the previous course where our resolution was to split the course which I believe reduced the issues but didn't totally remove them.

Part of my remit to produce the re-design is to the bring the course back together so I suppose what I'm looking for is less of a disection of the old course and it's issues but more of a best practices for building the new course? i.e. should I avoid including multiple layers when containing video? is it better to host video's on a media server and embed a link rather than inserting them straight into the course or is there no difference?

Hope this makes sense.

Thanks again

Kevin

Leslie McKerchie
over 5 years ago01/23/19 at 8:04 pm (UTC)

 Thanks for the additional details, Kevin.

Here is how the content is preloaded in Storyline. If you are looking to recombine the content and it's video heavy, some of that load will certainly be alleviated with hosting the videos vs. adding them to your course.

Will this course be uploaded to your LMS? It looks like that support case mentioned publishing to TinCan and 300mb should be okay. It looks like we were unable to replicate the issue and the original issue pointed to a flash error.

With your permission, I'd like for you to share your project file with a support engineer to take another look and to investigate what's happening now that you're working on the project. You can share it by uploading it here. It will be deleted when troubleshooting is complete.

Kevin Fox
5 years ago01/25/19 at 9:13 am (UTC)

Hi Leslie,

Thanks for your input, I'll certainly keep in mind how storyline preloads when building the redesigned course.

I haven't built the new course yet I was looking to get as much input as I could upfront to hopefuly avoid any issues but certainly once I have redesigned the course I will share my findings and if required my course for troubleshooting.

Thanks again.

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