Showstopper iPad LMS SCORM issues w/ Storyline Update 4 & Update 5

Feb 27, 2014

Matt Leo
By Matt Leo

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Hi everyone!

I've been compiling a list of findings from my research/testing of Storyline courses, and their behavior on our client's Moodle-based LMS, specifically for iPad published in HTML5 for SCORM 1.2. Perhaps others will have similar issues or information that can help us with the bugs we have found. At the very least, this should provide some recent documentation on iPad-specific SCORM releases.

Our client's LMS is running version 2.4 of Moodle, and we have no ability to change any CSS, PHP, etc, due to the third-party that runs the LMS. As it stands, we believe that our primary showstopping bug (See "Resize Bug" below) is caused by using this older version of Moodle. However, we have experienced additional bugs from version changes of both iOS and Storyline. We have tested our courses directly (outside of LMS) and on SCORM Cloud in addition to testing on our client's LMS.

Here are the factors in play that each have their own set of bugs:

  • Storyline Update 5: This version of Storyline has a major showstopping bug in which audio does not play in many of our courses on iPads running iOS 6. See: http://community.articulate.com/forums/t/44607.aspx More specifically, audio that is played automatically on the timeline does not work. This has occurred in direct/web testing and on SCORM Cloud, in addition to our client's LMS. We have other courses where audio is played explicitly through "on click" triggers, and the audio plays correctly. Because of this bug, and other possible unforeseen issues typical of a new release, we made the choice to roll back to Storyline Update 4.
  • Storyline Update 4 (1311.1422): This is the version of Storyline that seems to be the most stable at this point. We have spent the last 3-4 months using this version, and it has been fairly reliable. There are still a number of bugs that we have run into that are slightly different between iPad iOS 6 and iOS 7, but we have been able to find workarounds for most of these.

 

Resize Bug - The #1 Showstopper

 

The "resizing bug" where courses load zoomed in and are unusable (iOS 7) or have a portion of the screen cut off (iOS 6) has been my primary focus recently. From both research and testing, it seems that the most likely cause is the LMS. However, it would be fair to request that Articulate tries to come up with a reasonable patch for this, since it would be much better if the developers using the authoring tool could provide the fix, rather than the slow-moving LMS world. It may not even be possible for us to convince the owners of the LMS to upgrade. This resizing bug does not happen on direct/web testing, nor on SCORM Cloud.

When we were early in the development of our client's Storyline courses, we were using Storyline Update 3. The LMS is set up with a version of Moodle (2.4) that claimed to be the most stable for Storyline Update 3, and it passed our initial testing back in Oct-Nov 2013. However, reverting to Storyline Update 3 is out of the question now, because there were many fixes in Update 4 that are needed for our courses to work properly.

 

Summary

While iPad compatibility is always bringing us something new to fix, we have narrowed down our two greatest bugs of the moment:

 

  • Storyline Update 5 is unusable at the moment due to an audio issue. We are still investigating this with the help of the Articulate staff.
  • The "resizing bug" in which our courses are loaded incorrectly on our client's LMS is still being investigated, and our next step is to attempt testing with Moodle 2.6.1.

If anyone has more information on either of these bugs, please do share! Also, specific samples can be presented to Articulate staff if needed, but must be sent privately due to the proprietary information of our client.

 

Thanks!

- Matt

2 Replies
Ashley Terwilliger-Pollard
10 years ago02/27/14 at 1:04 pm (UTC)

Hi Matt,

Thanks for sharing that here and I also just wanted to let other community members know that the two issues you mentioned in your summary have been reported to our QA team and they're looking into both of them. 

In regards to issue first mentioned about audio not playing in iOS6 when published in update 5 - this is in regards to the SCORM Cloud/SCORM published content only, as our team is not able to replicate the behavior in a web server version - either ours or the one previously provided to us from Misha in this thread.. 

The resizing issues seem to be connected with LMS's that are launching content in Storyline content not resizing correctly in an LMS which are launching in an iFrame and being viewed on mobile safari. Since this one is not reproducible in SCORM Cloud it's taking a bit more to determine the commonalities between different LMSs and what is needed for Storyline's published output to resize. With this in mind, I have heard from a number of users who are connecting with their LMS as well to request that content is not forced into an iFrame. The author of the SCORM module in Moodle is also a frequent contributor here in our Forums, so you might consider sending Dan a Private Message as well. 

For anyone else who may be experiencing similar, we'd be happy to test your files as well.  

Once we have some additional information to share, we'll try to post in all the relevant threads as well. 

Thanks again, and if you need anything else just let us know! 

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