Storyline2 + Custom LMS, intermittent problems resuming course

Nov 07, 2014

Barry Niehuser
By Barry Niehuser

We have ~12 full courses consisting of ~10 units (each a storyline2 course, published as SCORM 1.2 both HTML5 and Flash) which are served to roughly 100-150 students total per day using a custom-coded LMS interface supporting SCORM 1.2

Once or twice every day or two (~1 in 100 students) we receive a report from a student who has a problem resuming a unit of their course -- the storyline interface loads, and the menu shows all the slides available in the unit, however the main slide panel is blank and none of the interface buttons work (including clicking on slides in the menu panel).  If the student happens to be in a quiz, sometimes the question will load with no answer selected and a big 'INCORRECT' shows at the bottom of the screen, as if they were reviewing the quiz answers.  Many users have seen this problem while resuming on a desktop after initially viewing from a mobile device, however it seems to randomly affect all browsers and devices, randomly among any of the 100+ storyline2 courses that make up our course structures. 

Due to the inconsistency of the problem, we have not been able to replicate it  hosting the courses on another LMS, however if we access the problem students' courses through our LMS the problem is consistent once it occurs, regardless of browser or device used to access it.

I am the author of the custom LMS, and my guess is that there is some corruption of the suspend_data going on, however I have yet to see anything obvious in the data that makes it seem as if it were corrupt or missing.  After initially believing the issue to be in character encoding, all transfer/storage of the SCORM data has been specified as UTF-8, but the problem still persists.  No error messages are generated from in-browser diagnosis or the custom LMS server component.

Mostly I am wondering if anyone has seen this behavior on another custom (or commercial) LMS or could provide insight on what could be going wrong.  If anyone is willing to help I can provide suspend_data and/or access credentials to view the problem in action.  

I'm hoping someone knows or can figure out what's going on here, thanks for taking your time to help me with this!

5 Replies
Emily Ruby
over 9 years ago11/10/14 at 6:06 pm (UTC)

Hello Barry,

Once thing we suggest is to test the content in the SCORM Cloud, the industry standard for testing, to see if you can replicate the behavior. This will let you know if it is LMS specific, or course specific.

You can look at this article here on general LMS troubleshooting, and hopefully other members in the community can jump in with suggestions.

 

Christie Moss
over 9 years ago11/10/14 at 10:07 pm (UTC)

Hi Emily,

I work with Barry and have uploaded one of our course files to SCORMcloud as suggested.  We are experiencing this same issue in SCORMcloud as with our custom LMS.

Link to Broken Course on SCORMcloud

On the SCORMcloud back end it is showing "There are no client debug logs." under Debug Logs.

The course stopped working for me after starting the course on an iphone 6, resuming on PC (did not save progress from iphone session), going back to the iphone (did save progress from PC session), and then finally logging back in on a PC, the link above will show what I experienced at that point.

Since it appears this is an issue with the course and not the LMS, any information you can provide in regards to troubleshooting would be much appreciated!

Christie Moss
over 9 years ago11/13/14 at 5:21 pm (UTC)

Hi Emily,

I provided the link as an example of the error -- what you are seeing there is the problem we're experiencing!

Unfortunately, due to legal restrictions on our course content, I cannot provide the .story file on a public forum.

I've opened a case with Articulate for this, so hopefully the person handling the case will have a recommendation.  Thanks!

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