Performance and report issues with a SCORM

Feb 22, 2018

Alistair Cooper
By Alistair Cooper

Hi all,

We're piloting a package at the moment and are experiencing a few issues; we suspect it might be due to a large number of quiz slides in the package. I'm hoping that you kind people can help!

We've set up the course as per the instructions in this blog post - basically there is a page with a whole series of questions on it, and the response of each question sets a value to a separate variable (see attachment 'question screen screencap'). There is then a quiz slide for each variable, hidden from the user by a 'loading' image. The results slide then pulls through each of these quiz slides to the report. We've hosted the packages (there are 5 of them) on our moodle.

But we're having the following issues:

  1. When we pull off the reports, there are some oddities:
    1. The main one - users have completed the module, but not all their marks are being captured;
    2. In the status column, as well as completed/incomplete, some users have the entry '50';
    3. Some user's responses for a quiz have been captured twice - ie, on the report, there are extra columns at the end for just this user, which restate the results for some of their questions.
    4. One user is showing as complete, but no responses are captured for them.
  2. A few users find that the elearning stalls when going through the 'loading' screens (that cover the quiz slides that the variables are reporting to). If they close it down, reopen and resume from where they left off, it appears to continue from where they left off and take them through to the final screen.
  3. One user has reported that the audio drops off for some of the videos for stretches of about 10 seconds.

 

Each module contains video files - we wondered if file size was one of the problems, but they are all about the same size, in terms of video content (about 55mb each). However the two modules where the issues seem to occur more frequently have a larger number of questions/variables and therefore quiz slides - about an additional 15 in total (a total of around 40 quiz slides). This makes us wonder whether this is overtaxing the connection with the moodle in some way? Any ideas? Thanks indeed for any help!

13 Replies
Leslie McKerchie
6 years ago02/22/18 at 6:52 pm (UTC)

Hi Alistair,

I see you've reached out to our support team as well as you mentioned here, so thank you.

It looks like your questions are pretty LMS specific, which is out of our realm of support. Are you able to replicate any of this behavior in SCORM Cloud or is it specific to your LMS? I know we have many Moodle users here as well and looks like Matthew has already shared some helpful advice.

Dan Marsden
6 years ago02/22/18 at 11:10 pm (UTC)

Could be a performance issue with your Moodle site/config but it's hard to interpret with the information provided so far - I'd suggest you ask for help in the Moodle community forums (moodle.org) and make sure you include information on your Moodle version and how it is managed/hosted (do you host it yourselves?)

Alistair Cooper
6 years ago02/23/18 at 11:53 am (UTC)

Hello all, many thanks for the comments.

Matthew - thanks for the suggestion. Yes, it's published in 1.2. I tried 2004 v3, but experienced the same 'stalling' at the quiz/loading screens myself (forcing me to exit and resume). More critically, the report doesn't seem to capture the individual variable data (captured via quiz slides reporting to the results slide) that we need, but only gives a complete/incomplete result.

I believe the question logic is set up correctly; though I could be wrong of course! It's a fairly straightforward path - as long as users have provided an answer for each question, they can progress to the next slide.

Leslie, in terms of SCORM cloud, the completion of the course and the data don't seem to be being captured (see attached screencap). I completed the package (twice) but the completion data (or further quiz slide/variable data) doesn't appear to be showing. Of course, that could be my not using Scorm Cloud correctly!

Dan: Good suggestion, thanks - I'll pop something up in the SCORM sub forum shortly. Short version, we're on moodle version 3.1, hosted on our own virtual server. Would there be any other info useful for me to put in the moodle forum post?

A potentially useful further detail: the stalling of the quiz slides appears more likely to occur on the first run through. It's rare that it stalls in subsequent run throughs.

Thanks again all, and further suggestions/comments very welcome!

Alistair Cooper
6 years ago02/27/18 at 12:44 pm (UTC)

Based on Dan's response on the moodle forums, and my having more of a play around with SCORM cloud [short version - yes I was using it incorrectly!] it does seem pretty clear that it's a LMS issue rather than an articulate one. We'll look into it from that side of things. Thanks for the help though - much appreciated.

Alistair Cooper
5 years ago03/18/19 at 2:02 pm (UTC)

Hi Eveline,

 

Yep - basically it was a database connection issue on our moodle server causing the problem. Dug out my write up in the post project docs from the time, hope makes sense:

 

Essentially, the SCORM package that the modules were exported to from the authoring software (Storyline 3) is uploaded to Moodle, and when a user opens the module, there is fairly constant back and forth communication between the package and Moodle whilst the users interacts with the module.

At the time, our Moodle was undergoing an intermittent database timeout error issue, where communications between Moodle and the database that sits behind it were taking a long enough time to occur that the moodle assumed the database could not be accessed. In relation to the SCORM packages, when a user was going through the package (and therefore a SCORM was communicating with moodle) this issue could occur, with the effect that the SCORM could not pass on users marks or progress back to moodle. The outcome was that when this happened (in approx. 1/3 of times accessed – more if using a slower connection/devices) the package would not allow users to progress, and not capture their full results (or capture the same question results multiple times).

Our database team looked into this, identifying the issue and putting a piece of code in to moodle that essentially said ‘if you experience this timeout, stop and try again, up to ten times’. This workaround solved the issue, as anytime it occurred, rather than stopping, our moodle would try again until it could get a connection (and therefore allow the SCORM and moodle to communicate).

 

The longer term solution was to fix the database error - couldn't tell you how that was solved through!

Peter Bryant
over 3 years ago10/30/20 at 2:07 pm (UTC)

Hi Alistair,

I have taken ownership of a project using Articulate generated SCORM running on Moodle LMS. We also seem to have intermittent problems with incomplete status.

This may be quite a direct question but are you in a position to share the piece of code your database team added to moodle? 

If this has worked for you I would really like to try this for my system too, as I am sure others with a similar setup might.

Many regards

Peter

 

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