Storyline 360: Issues/limitations with Step-by-step Try mode feature?

Jun 01, 2023

John Freiberger
By John Freiberger

Hello,

I have been creating a series of eLearning courses that contain software simulations consisting of scenarios that combine several of the tasks the students have learned about in the lesson parts of the courses and these scenarios now give them some "hands-on" experience trying out what they have learned. I created the simulations using the record screen feature in Storyline 360 and inserted the recordings as step-by-step try mode slides. I modified many of the stock triggers and interactions that Storyline inserted in order to fulfill the scope of the scenarios. Each simulation consists of three scenarios; the total number of slides in the projects ranges from 60-100 slides; the .story file sizes range from 23 MB to 1,274 MB (yep, one of them is hefty!!). The students can complete these scenarios in any order and they can retry them as needed.  I tested each simulation thoroughly in Storyline and in Rise (they were inserted in Rise as interactive Storyline blocks) and did not have any performance issues. No issues were reported by my review team when they went through the courses and simulations in Review.

After uploading to our LMS, numerous issues were reported, including lags (animated three dots that never resolve themselves) and stoppages (clicking on a UI element, such as a button or drop-down menu, but the simulation just stops working) have resulted. I have tested and encountered these issues from my corporate computer on the corporate network as well as my personal computer on my home network. Issues have occurred in Chrome and Edge. An internal tester reported the same issues (he was the one who found them as an enrolled student in the LMS).

I did break up the SCORM package for one of the courses that contained the lessons and simulation into two SCORM packages: one for the lesson content and the other for the simulation. Doing that resolved the lag issue (animated three dots). However, this approach did not work for one of the courses experiencing the other issue (simulation simply hitting a wall and stopping).

I have an open ticket with our LMS provider, but they are not seeing the issues. I have also been able to get through one course w/o issue in SCORM Cloud.

Are there any known issues with the step-by-step try mode feature? I am running Storyline v3.76.30446.0 (just updated it yesterday!).

Any help is much appreciated! Thanks!!

John

2 Replies
Jose Tansengco
11 months ago06/01/23 at 8:07 pm (UTC)

Hi John,

Thanks for reaching out, and good call on testing your course in SCORM Cloud!

It looks like your course worked without any issues when you tested it on a different LMS. This could indicate that the behavior is specific to your LMS, although its strange that your LMS provider is unable to replicate the behavior. 

One thing you can do is to enable the LMS debug logs for your course and test the issue again in your LMS. When you experience the lag and stoppages again, capture the LMS debug logs and provide with to your LMS support team so they can take a closer look at what's happening. 

We'll also be glad to test the course on our end if you'd like. This way, we can verify if we will be able to observe any unusual behavior in your course when accessed through SCORM Cloud. Feel free to share a copy of your project file here or in private by opening a support case so we can test it, and we'll delete it when we're done!

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