Offline error message

Hello Penny, 

Sorry to hear that you ran into this issue. 

I recommend testing your course in a different LMS like SCORM Cloud to see if the issue is isolated to your LMS.

If you are able to replicate the behavior in SCORM Cloud, then the issue might be caused by your network or it might also be course related. Please open a case with our support team here  if this is the case.

If the you are only experiencing the behavior when your course is hosted on your LMS, you can enable the LMS debug logs for your computer to see what message is generated in the logs whenever your course goes offline. 

• Storyline and Studio: How to Enable LMS Debug Mode

this is a 'know' problem with storyline - introduces with version 3.69 (November 2022)

it can happen on some (many ???) LMS and on normal web server

typical error: the error message appears (that could be ok), but not disappear (-> bug)

it seems (?*) not a problem with Scorm Cloud, but with many other LMS

* perhaps because Scorm Cloud has more computing capacity per active user

Some LMSs have a timeout function after say 30m minutes of no activity they drop the connection.

on every "show layer" and on "slide change" storyline sends the "resume string" to the LMS - so the 30 minutes should not really matter

but if this is a problem - why storyline don't sends data  in case of inactivity

for this we send pings "user is alive" to the server in our web applications

Thanks Phil and Jurgen. I can't even replicate the issue on our LMS. I just have too many students raising it as an issue to ignore it. The problem is that once the issue happens they can't continue with the presentation - it is like Storyline has saved that as their status and they can't continue.

We use Thinkific so we don't publish to SCORM. We use the web publish option.

>We use Thinkific so we don't publish to SCORM. We use the web publish option.

this means that not the LMS creates the problem - it happens on normal webserver

Thanks Jurgen, so would this be a Storyline bug as you mentioned earlier?

yes it is definitely a new bug in storyline - at least trainings generated with storyline 3.68 (October 2022) and earlier are working

Thanks, we did just republish all our presentations so students had the option to change speed, which is something they have been asking for for ages. I'll see if I can report it elsewhere. Thanks.

Hi Penny,

Thanks for letting us know about this! I understand that you getting an "Offline...trying to reconnect" error message. I'd be happy to get you some information about this. The error message you're seeing is a bug in the software that has already been reported. I'm going to add your voice to the report. If there's any news regarding this bug, this conversation will be updated.

Thanks John for the update. Really appreciate it.

Penny

Hello Penny,

I shared a workaround from our team here. 

Hi John - We created a case today on this issue, as we've started experiencing it within the past few weeks. We are being told that:

"Rest assured, this feature has been thoroughly tested by the Product team prior to its release.  After receiving reports of issues with this feature, our Product team had worked with multiple customers and through exhaustive tests we have confirmed that the feature works as designed.

Currently, the customer examples we’ve tested and monitored can’t reproduce the issue and that if it’s consistent for you, then we need your help to get reproduction steps.

We believe that the learners who experienced the issue were in a state where an asset was not being delivered either because of Internet speed or something related to the delivery of the asset from the server."

So is Articulate now saying that this feature is not a bug, and is working as designed?

>So is Articulate now saying that this feature is not a bug, and is working as designed?

you can disable this faulty feature in the html file

That's the response we got from Articulate - I also read it as them saying there isn't an issue, which is not in line with the messaging here. 

I know it can be disabled, but we have 400+ courses and that's just not a scalable fix, unfortunately. 

if there will be a fix - you will have to recreate all of your courses with new storyline version and all learner will lose the ability to resume (partially) processed courses

with updating only the html - the resume state will survive

This is very disappointing. I'm being pushed to move away from Storyline completely and this response will not help my case. Thanks for sharing.

Hi, everyone!

I have some great news to share. We just released another update for Storyline 360. In Update 76, we’ve included important fixes and new features!

One enhancement we’ve included:

 The lost connectivity alert is now optional. Turn it on in the player properties.

To take advantage of this update, launch the Articulate 360 desktop app on your computer, and click the Update button next to Storyline 360. You'll find our step-by-step instructions here.

Please let me know if you need additional help!

thanks for the update. This is good to know. We will give it a try for our next cohort of students. Thanks.

Hi Penny,

We'd be happy to hear how this update will benefit your courses. Let us know if you run into any issues, or contact our Support team directly for more targeted help.

Thank you!