Blank screen after update

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.