Tracking issues and random freezes
May 26, 2017
I wonder if anyone has had any experience with courses freezing at random points and not at the same time, not tracking correctly. We have a couple of support calls logged with Articulate and our internal IT team and LMS provider are also working on the problem. I'm holding off a full launch of one course that supports part of a major project within our business and have had to take the other off line, until we can solve the problem
Both courses seem to freeze randomly, most commonly when a text entry is require or a video plays, but not always on the same slides. Both courses have a number of both slide types. The page can sometimes be refreshed, or the course logged out of and resumed for the problem to clears. Most commonly the course needs to be restarted from the beginning.
The tracking problem occurs when the user complete the course fully but the LMS records an incomplete status, this is affecting about 20% of users. The two courses are tracked differently within the course one by tracking a quiz with the passing percentage set to zero and the other by slide count. I have run both courses in Scormcloud and they work ok. I have run both courses in Storyline debug mode and they seem run ok. I have only managed to repeat the issues with one of the courses and the log looks ok, but I'm waiting for this to be confirmed. When the fault does occur, it keeps reoccurring, until the browser cache is cleared or the browser is run in incognito mode.
We are running the courses in developer mode in Chrome and no issues are showing. All users access the courses from a training PC running windows 7 over the company network, the PC's are of similar similarly spec and build, some location are experiencing a higher level of fault than others. I have tried access the courses using different logins with different network profiles and different spec PC's, using windows 7 and 10 none of which has helped.
If anyone can point us in the direction of what else we can investigate it would be a great help.
Thanks
Jeremy
13 Replies
Hi there Jeremy, so sorry you've run into this. I know that's frustrating, especially when the problem seems somewhat random. It looks like you're working with Cleo in cases 01073326 and 01079409--you're in good hands there. I'll also follow along!
Was this issue resolved? We are experiencing something very similar, any insight on what the issue was and how it was resolved will be helpful. Thank.
Hi John. Thanks for checking in. Jeremy and the support team concluded that some users were experiencing slow connection issues causing data loss.
We'd love to give you a hand, though, John. Can you open a case with out support team so we can start troubleshooting the freezing you're experiencing? Thanks!
WE never managed to isolate a single cause of this problem, but making several small changes, did make a small improvements.
Course tracking:
As Crystal suggested, we split the course into three modules.
The course also had several videos, these were converted to a lower bit rate and made smaller in the course to reduce the file sizes.
To further reduce the file size we used the following setting in the publishing setting for quality; video 1, Audio 56kbps, Image quality 30%. This seemed to give a good compromise between quality and usability.
Our LMS provider changed the parameters on the Suspend data field within their system, as Storyline was saving more than the SCORM standard allowed, even when the course was split into three. They changed the setting to NVARCHAR if that means anything to you, it doesn't to me.
Undoubtedly a slow PC and a slow connection made this problem much worse. One failed asset or line of code showing in Developer tools would cause the course to mis-track. This would happen even on faster machines occasionally. I use a very powerful PC that is designed for video editing on a Gigabit connection and have experience this issue. We used the following Java script on the last slide to force the LMS to complete ( triggered it at the start of the timeline):
var lmsAPI = parent;
lmsAPI.SCORM_CallLMSSetValue("cmi.core.lesson_status", "completed");
This code alone reduced the mis-tracking rate from 15% to less that 5%.
Course freezing:
This seemed to be linked to one of two issues.
Hope this helps.
Jeremy
I am having issues with tracking as well with an Articulate 360 course in our LMS (NetDimensions). I have a published course that performs well, so no issues there, but the LMS tracking does not work in I.E..Never had this issue in Storyline2 (same client,same LMS, same browser).
It does work in Chrome, Safari and Firefox. So it took us a while to discover where it went wrong. In internet Explorer, unfortunately the default browser of my client, the course does not resume where it was left if you pause in the middle and it does not reach the completed status.
I changed my publishing options from flash/HTML5 fallback to HTML5/Flash fallback but that is no solution. Looking through the community I find loads of stuff about the performing issues that were solved a few months ago but no new issues on tracking like this. Anyone any ideas?
Anouk
Hi there, Anouk. Thanks for describing the differences you're seeing between IE and the other browsers when resuming and reporting your course. I did a quick test in SCORM Cloud, and I was able to resume a course in IE several times and get the proper reporting. I tested both HTML5 and Flash output.
Could you run your LMS output through SCORM Cloud as well, and test in IE to compare? If it resumes and plays properly in SCORM Cloud, you'll be able to go to your LMS support team with concrete details about the course working in other environments.
Let me know if you need a hand with that!
Hi Chrystal,
Thanks for your reply. Yesterday, my supplier (of both LMS and Dutch agent for Articulate) did exactly that. In SCORM cloud there are no issues but in the used LMS they can reproduce the issue. So they are looking further into it. It seems an LMS issue after all rather than Articulate. Hopefully they find a solution.
Really appreciate you keeping us in the loop, Anouk. Keep us posted on what NetDimensions says, and we'll be standing by if you need anything else!
Anouk, I'm faced with this exact issue now. Fortunately, we are moving to a new LMS. Unfortunately, I have a big deliverable that needs to go out now that fails to update the transcript. (Works fine on scorm cloud and on the future LMS... just not the current one I need to publish to).
What did your team find? Did you try changing the JS code in the Configuration.js file?
Greetings, Owen!
I'm sorry to hear you're facing this issue on your current LMS. I'd love to help in any way I can!
First, just in case Anouk is no longer subscribed here, feel free to use the Contact Me button on their profile page to reach out!
It might be helpful to enable LMS Debug Mode to see the communication between Storyline and the current LMS. If you can share the resulting debug log with your LMS team, they should be able to track down the cause. If you're able to share the log with us here, we can help interpret it!
Good luck, and I hope some community members can weigh in!
Another thing that sometimes helps if you have access to an IT resource who has Fiddler or something like HTTP Watch and knows how to use them and interpret them (it is a bit technical).
With those, you can see the all the many pieces of content downloading to the PC. Sometimes you might find an issue like something is not downloading or taking an awfully long time to download.
I am having similar issues and wonder if they might be related. On SCORM-based assessments created using Storyline 360, the slightest loss of connection results in data not being sent back to the LMS. This is a problem as we pull down data from the LMS into a database from which we report. Until the session is restored with the LMS, the data doesn't come through. Unfortunately, we have no way of knowing when the connection has been lost. I've spotted some articles on how to create an alert to the user that their LMS session has been suspended, but these are all based on Flash content, which obviously isn't an option these days.
We can get round this problem to an extent by using the review feature to facilitate candidate feedback, meaning that although some data may be missing from the database, the assessor can use the candidate's tablet device to review incorrect answers without having to rely on the data getting through.
However, we now have a problem that the candidate is unable to complete the learning at all if they reach a text input question. They can't input their answer or at least it doesn't send. This gives us a huge problem as it means the candidate cannot complete the assessment at all, at least beyond where they've got to. Indeed, for a couple of candidates yesterday it happened on the very first question!
I've tested the content at home and it works fine - at least until there was a temporary glitch in my otherwise reliable home internet connection. In that instance, the questions worked for a few more but then froze on a text input question which I couldn't get past. When I came out and went back into the assessment, clicking resume, it put me back several questions then drew different questions to the ones I'd answered before the freeze.
Any advice gratefully received as we have many assessments in this format that have worked for several years without these issues. It's only in the last year that we've experienced these new problems, and relatively recently that the text input phenomenon has occurred.
Hi Andrew!
Thank you so much for sharing these details with us! It sounds like the course is freezing mainly when reaching a text entry field. From what you've mentioned, it would be helpful for us to look at the project to understand its behavior. Would you mind sharing the .story file with us? Here's a secure upload link. We'll delete the file after troubleshooting.
Also, would you mind sharing which LMS your organization is using?
We'll let you know as soon as we receive the file and being testing!