Blank screen after update

I believe I've found a solution to this issue which I've been able to tested successfully in Moodle and may work for other LMSs as well:

1. Unzip the Rise SCORM 1.2 zip package (I haven't tested this for SCORM 2004) and locate the file scormdriver.js in the /scormdriver folder.

2. Open scormdriver.js in Notepad or other text editor.

3. Locate this function, and highlight the entire line:

function SCORM_GetBookmark(){WriteToDebug("In SCORM_GetBookmark");SCORM_ClearErrorInfo();return SCORM_CallLMSGetValue("cmi.core.lesson_location");}

4. Replace it with this function:

function SCORM_GetBookmark(){WriteToDebug("In SCORM_GetBookmark");SCORM_ClearErrorInfo();return "";}

This basically disables the bookmark retrieval code so that while all the learner completion and progress status is retained (and shows on the left side Rise menu), it causes Rise to always restart at the opening page. 

Then re-zip up the Rise SCORM package (make sure to create the zip from the root folder of the course) and re-upload to the LMS. 

Hi, we also experience this problem very often. After (minor) changes of the content, all students that did not complete the SCORM content get an "blank page" because the Articulate Rise player is not able to use

- the old suspend data
- and/or lesson location. 

Please fix this issue by changing the player to
- start at the beginning if the lesson location does not longer exist
- parse the suspend data as far a possible and "ignore" no longer existing pages/chapters
- in a worst case scenario display an information like "We are deeply sorry, but due to technical reasons we had to reset your progress" and let the student start from the beginning.

But there is no reason to let the player "crash" with a blank screen if it can not process the old suspend data or lesson location. And an more robust player should not be an big issue (just some try/catch statements).

And the tip to "delete it on LMS" side also does not help, because that requires sometimes hundreds of changes or reset all students that started after change in the content and could continue. 
This "blank page" experience is very unsatisfying for the leaner. It also did cost us a lot of hour to find out, that it is an issue of the articulate/rise player. 

Also if I understood correctly this issue was the topic for several threads and was fixed several times, but seems to be an issue a again a few month later. If I find the older threads again, I will post a link.

Hi all, 

the issue is "known" for more than 2 years. It was supposedly fixed in May 2018 but popped up again in 2019.  Storyline was also affected. 

The amount of support this problem causes is staggering! Especially in Covid 19 times with a lot of home office and new "Rise content" (which is often changed/corrected and published again). We have had nearly a thousand cases of affected students over several customers.

We are also an "Articulate Reseller". Our customers to whom we recommended "Articulate" are not pleased.  Especially those customers who have read the community articles (see below) pointing out that the problem has been known for several years.
They might be different problems, but to our customers who use Articulate products it just looks like "the problem has been ignored". 

So for crying out loud: Please fix this known problem!

The "solution" was also suggested several times in one way or another. 
See my earlier post or the suggestion from Nathan Mcilree:
"My guess would be that the developers need to update the code that initialises the SCORM course so that if it does not recognise the location/resume data passed through it catches the error and treats the user as starting again - rather than just erroring in the background and stopping any content loading."

Here the (not complete) history so far: 

# 2018-01-26
https://community.articulate.com/discussions/rise-360/rise-suspend-data

# 2018-05-23 suposendly fixed "the problem was a suspend_data incompatibility between the two (versions) courses,"
https://community.articulate.com/discussions/rise-360/rise-suspend-data#reply-522276

# 2019-03-10
https://community.articulate.com/discussions/rise-360/scorm-rise-course-not-loading-83de403b-6a60-4153-ad86-02f5db9c51f3#reply-616856

Looking forward to a solution,

Tobias Loke

Jamie, whether or not your course opens in a new window is controlled by your LMS.

Popups need to be allowed on the browser to allow the course to open in it's own window.

The LMS window will stay open in the background.

Hello,

our team have the same problem and I would like to share our workarounds.
The problem is: Uploading a new version of a Rise Scorm-export causes a blank page for users who previously opened and unfinished the course. Reason is, that the player is not able to handle the outdated variables lesson_location and suspend_data. I agree to Lieve, Rise is the only authoring tool which has this problem. Great support by Peter from Articulate (Case #02248422), but currently no solution unfortunately. I wonder that this problem is known since years, but nothing happened until now. This is not professionel.

We have hundreds of courses in our LMS with the need to update some courses regularly. Deleting of results is not an option. So therefore this a big problem for us!

Known workarounds:
- delete the results of single users
- Do not copy courses, publish the copied courses and then update the scorm-file. Make the changes in the original course, if possible.
- make only small changements, then you have no problem
- change the whole scorm element in the LMS (with automatic generating new states of the both variables) - results will be deleted then.
- influence the variables lesson_location and suspend_data directly in your LMS (if supported by your LMS).

Any other workarounds from you would be very appreciated, because we can not follow these workarounds.

Indeed. Seems a bit weird how it's seemingly neglected. Our solution has been to
a.) not use Rise, and instead use storyline
b.) In the case someone has to use Rise they break it into smaller courses
c.) Where there has to be re-made, transfer / make the course in storyline and swap it.

Neither of these alternatives are good alternatives. So of course it would be way better  if there was a fix so Rise could be used without having to reset learner-progress. 

It's fine I found the line, it's been moved but it's still there in the scormdriver.js

This whole thing is just annoying - making changes to a Rise project with 3K users already enrolled...I do hope the Articulate team takes this seriously and provides a fix. It is a BIG deal. 

We are also using Totara! You had success with this update? I

I had to work around this problem yesterday myself and I can assure everyone that this problem is not an LMS issue. It is specific to Rise.

The problem is that Rise uses unique IDs for each lesson in a course, and these unique IDs change when you duplicate/copy/send a course. So, if you duplicated the course to do a version update, or if you sent the course to someone else so they could do a version update, the new version of the course will have different lesson IDs.

The lesson IDs are used for bookmarking, so if you overwrite an existing course in your LMS with a new a copied/sent version, all existing users who had previously accessed the course will now have a bookmark for a lesson ID which doesn't exist in the updated version of the course.

When the Rise course cannot find a lesson with the ID matching the user's bookmark, it generates an error, and it's at this point the updated course is breaking.

It would be simple for the Rise course to first check if the lesson ID exists before attempting to load the lesson data, but that's not happening at the moment, so the resulting error is what breaks the course.

Some LMSs, such as SCORM Cloud notice the error and respond to it by redirecting the user to the start of the learning content. That doesn't solve the underlying problem of the differences between IDs, but it at least allows users to access the learning materials, albeit after losing any progress they had previously made.

I'm a developer so I was able to add some javascript to indexAPI.html to catch any attempts to load an outdated lesson ID and point it to the equivalent new lesson ID instead, but I had to collect the list of old and new IDs first for that to work, and I'd potentially need to update those lists of IDs in the future if we do another update to the course. It worked for me but it's not a robust, workable solution that would help everyone else.

The quickest and simple possible change Articulate could make to fix this problem for everyone is to add in that error handling I mentioned. ie, to check if the requested bookmarked lesson ID exists before trying to load it, and if it doesn't exist, send the user to the default starting point of the course. That would allow all users to at least access the course materials, but it would only work for courses exported after that fix was added to Rise. 

The ideal outcome would be for the Articulate devs to make use of the originalId property of the lesson object to store the originial ID of each lesson. That way, if the requested lesson ID isn't found in the actual lesson IDs, it could then check against the lessons' originalId properties to see if it exists in any of those, and if it does, point the user to that lesson's content.

Ditto for me too. I've spent so long on this until I found this page & comments. A fix would be nice.