I have a number of live courses, delivered on Moodle LMS to learners outside my organisation. I need to make updates to the course, and previously I have been able to make small changes to the content and replace the SCO in Moodle without causing issues for learners who are in progress. However, this time after upgrading the course from Storyline 2 to Storyline 360, any learners in progress get a blank grey screen and are unable to continue with the course. Please can you let me know if there is an explanation for this and if there is any way to avoid it. Would it be better to go back to an old version of Storyline? or is this not advisable. Thanks
When you update (overwrite) existing course files in your LMS or web server, learners who previously started the course won't be able to resume where they left off. They'll start over at the first slide in the updated course.
Is this what learners are experiencing in your LMS? Also, what LMS are you using? Hopefully others who are using the same one can point you in the right direction.
All Moodle tracking data associated with your SCORM is linked to the identifier used in your SCORM package within the imsmanifest.xml.
When you update a SCORM package in Moodle it checks to see if the identifiers in your SCORM package matches the identifiers from the previous package and if they do not match it dumps all the old tracking data because it cannot associate it with your new package. Unfortunately it does this quietly, without warning the teacher that the identifiers in the new package don't match the identifiers in the old package - one day I'd like to improve this behaviour and there's a bit more discussion on this here: https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-24057
In the meantime, if you are able to make sure the identifiers in your new package, match the identifiers in your old package then the tracking data within Moodle should be retained. If you are unsure how to do this with articulate hopefully someone else can help with this.
Thanks for responding :) I’m using Articulate Storyline -I wasn’t aware of the manifest identifier issue until recently (after a lot of searching!) I’ve managed to trace back my file versions to the ones that are currently on our course sites and updated those to Articulate 360. I'm now thinking it is an Articulate issue rather than Moodle so I have someone looking at it at the moment for me. I'll let you know if it gets sorted. It would be REALLY helpful to get a warning in Moodle though!!
I do think it's a problem that Moodle just dumps tracking data without warning the teacher - we're so careful not to dump/change grades in other Moodle code without an explicit request - it's something we should definitely improve in Moodle sometime.
Sorry I haven't been able to reply earlier. It wasn't possible for us to overwrite the existing SCO without disrupting learners already in progress (completely broke things - grey screen and a random button from memory). However, we were able to come up with a work around in Moodle. I can't remember the exact details but we were able to set a text tag/flag in the profile of all the learners in progress with the SCO at the time of the update. We added the new SCO as a separate new activity and then used logic looking at the value of the flag set for the learner to determine which SCO activity was shown to them in the course. Learners in progress continued with the old SCO, new learners got the new SCO. Worked for us but required database access etc. If you want a more exact explanation let me know. Hope you get it sorted.
This is the description our support team sent me ...
1. we set up a custom user profile field named "SCORM Version available". This was created to hold a value to identify which scorm version the users should see (this field can be made visible only to administrators and not seen by the learner)
2. We added a new activity to the existing course for the new scorm. We had 2 separate activities, one with the old scorm, one with the new SCORM. We then set the criteria for each activity so that only the appropriate one would be visible. e.g. for those learners already in progress and needing to continue with the old scorm the criteria was 'Not available unless SCORM VERSION AVAILABLE is old scorm'. Same for those who should see the new scorm but set the criteria was 'Not available unless SCORM VERSION AVAILABLE is new scorm'.
3. we did a database query that would set all of the currently enrolled people (or just the people that are in progress) to be granted access to the old scorm.
Following on from the above. I have a course made up of 14 SCORM packages which I made in Storyline 360. I recently republished them all because there have been a number of 360 updates since I made them last year. They are all resuming as they were on the moodle site where they sit except for 3 of them. I have made no changes other than to republish.
Any suggestions as to what might have caused this? I've checked all the identifiers are still the same (as mentioned by Dan above).
Can I reverse the update to get back to the original file?
12 Replies
Hello
Did you have any success with this as I am having the same problem?
Hi Siobhan,
When you update (overwrite) existing course files in your LMS or web server, learners who previously started the course won't be able to resume where they left off. They'll start over at the first slide in the updated course.
Is this what learners are experiencing in your LMS? Also, what LMS are you using? Hopefully others who are using the same one can point you in the right direction.
All Moodle tracking data associated with your SCORM is linked to the identifier used in your SCORM package within the imsmanifest.xml.
When you update a SCORM package in Moodle it checks to see if the identifiers in your SCORM package matches the identifiers from the previous package and if they do not match it dumps all the old tracking data because it cannot associate it with your new package. Unfortunately it does this quietly, without warning the teacher that the identifiers in the new package don't match the identifiers in the old package - one day I'd like to improve this behaviour and there's a bit more discussion on this here:
https://tracker.moodle.org/browse/MDL-24057
In the meantime, if you are able to make sure the identifiers in your new package, match the identifiers in your old package then the tracking data within Moodle should be retained. If you are unsure how to do this with articulate hopefully someone else can help with this.
Hi Dan
Thanks for responding :) I’m using Articulate Storyline -I wasn’t aware of the manifest identifier issue until recently (after a lot of searching!) I’ve managed to trace back my file versions to the ones that are currently on our course sites and updated those to Articulate 360. I'm now thinking it is an Articulate issue rather than Moodle so I have someone looking at it at the moment for me. I'll let you know if it gets sorted. It would be REALLY helpful to get a warning in Moodle though!!
I do think it's a problem that Moodle just dumps tracking data without warning the teacher - we're so careful not to dump/change grades in other Moodle code without an explicit request - it's something we should definitely improve in Moodle sometime.
Hi
Sorry I haven't been able to reply earlier. It wasn't possible for us to overwrite the existing SCO without disrupting learners already in progress (completely broke things - grey screen and a random button from memory). However, we were able to come up with a work around in Moodle. I can't remember the exact details but we were able to set a text tag/flag in the profile of all the learners in progress with the SCO at the time of the update. We added the new SCO as a separate new activity and then used logic looking at the value of the flag set for the learner to determine which SCO activity was shown to them in the course. Learners in progress continued with the old SCO, new learners got the new SCO. Worked for us but required database access etc. If you want a more exact explanation let me know. Hope you get it sorted.
Thank you Stephanie, I may well get back to you! :)
Hi Stephanie
I've been speaking with our head of IT and he's really interested to know how you got this to work. Would you be able to send us some more detail?
Many thanks in advance
Siobhan
This is the description our support team sent me ...
1. we set up a custom user profile field named "SCORM Version available". This was created to hold a value to identify which scorm version the users should see (this field can be made visible only to administrators and not seen by the learner)
2. We added a new activity to the existing course for the new scorm. We had 2 separate activities, one with the old scorm, one with the new SCORM. We then set the criteria for each activity so that only the appropriate one would be visible. e.g. for those learners already in progress and needing to continue with the old scorm the criteria was 'Not available unless SCORM VERSION AVAILABLE is old scorm'. Same for those who should see the new scorm but set the criteria was 'Not available unless SCORM VERSION AVAILABLE is new scorm'.
3. we did a database query that would set all of the currently enrolled people (or just the people that are in progress) to be granted access to the old scorm.
Hope that helps
Stephanie
Thanks for taking the time to respond so quickly Stephanie, I shall pass this on to our IT team :)
No worries at all - let me know if you want any more info
Hi
Following on from the above. I have a course made up of 14 SCORM packages which I made in Storyline 360. I recently republished them all because there have been a number of 360 updates since I made them last year. They are all resuming as they were on the moodle site where they sit except for 3 of them. I have made no changes other than to republish.
Any suggestions as to what might have caused this? I've checked all the identifiers are still the same (as mentioned by Dan above).
Can I reverse the update to get back to the original file?
Many thanks
Siobhan
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