Resume slide when student takes a break

Hi Paula,

It's possible that the course surpassed the suspend data limit as detailed here. 

Thank you Ashley. I will give that a try. I would have never have thought of that.

Thanks, Ashley. This is very useful to me at the moment. Could you provide three additional bits of info?

• If the suspend data issue happens, what is the likely consequence of this? Does the resume just refuse to work, or is it more likely that it will pick up at the wrong screen? 
• How are "characters" measured? 
• Could you provide a layman's explanation of what "suspend data" actually is!

Hi James,

If you reach the maximum for suspend data the course will resume to wherever the limit was met - depending on how much content and data is on your slides and what is being communicated to the LMS, it could be at any point in the course. To learn more about the SCORM set up you may want to review the information on Rustici's website as they have a lot of good explanations. 

The suspend data is all the data that is communicated from the course to your LMS and what the LMS will use to determine where the user can pick up when they return to the course. So keeping track of what slide the user was on, any quiz questions answered, etc. As far as characters - we compress the suspend data to help with the overall limit so I'm not certain what actual characters are read as it's not human readable, but I believe they're like regular characters (i.e. letters, numbers, symbols, etc.). 

Hi Ashley - That's very helpful. And we help me answer a client's query about why they sometimes don't resume back at the place they left. They are on a SCORM 1.2 LMS!

Sorry, another question, if you don't mind. If you set the publishing option to NOT ignore the Flash cookie when running in an LMS, would this still be an issue?

Hi James,

Glad I could help point you in the right direction.

The suspend data will still be met if you've published for SCORM 1.2 (which I suspect you are if the LMS only supports Scorm 1.2), and it would be controlled instead by the Flash cookie and not the LMS. 

Thanks, Ashley! So, if you have a large course but the learner doesn't go beyond the 4,000 character limit of SCORM 1.2, all will be well. If you go beyond that, the learner will be returned to the point where the character limit ran out. 

Great - thank you! 

Exactly. There isn't a way to see when they've reached the 4,000 character limit though - so it may be confusing to users if at the first attempt they resume and the second one, after going further, they don't. 

Ah, I see. So, it doesn't reset the character limit back to 4,000 after each limit? Is it a cumulative character build over a number of sessions?

Hi James, you can test this in scormcloud and see the bookmarking data.  My experience is that it is LMS dependent but normally it gets truncated at the point it overruns, often storyline will then just start from the beginning because the resume data becomes meaningless.

Thanks for a million for that, Phil. Sorry, can I just ask you for a little more clarity. My apologies for harping on about it, but I have a client who is asking me lots of questions about this and I just want to be absolutely clear on what I am telling them. 

When you say "start from the beginning" do you mean the course will just restart from screen 1, despite the prompt to resume appearing? 

If I can provide an illustration. If I have a 10 screen course, and  the LMS 4,000 character limit is used up by screen 5, but the learner progresses to screen 7, when they select resume on their next visit, my understanding how is that most LMS's will return the learner to screen 5. But are you saying that, typically, it actually return the learner to screen 1?

That's a great tip about ScormCloud. I'll give that a go at some point over the weekend. Thank you.  

Yes because the bookmarking data is compressed, if it is truncated it often become unintelligible, at this point I think Storyline's Player dumps the resume data and starts from screen 1.  It doesn't always happen but does on some occasions, even if it asks if you want to resume.

Many thanks for that, Phil. This helps provide some context to conversations I have been having with my client.