Blank screen after update

Hello everyone,

Weighing in here with what we've seen with this issue over in our neck of the woods (we use Moodle and Rise).

In our testing we found that the "Reset Learner Progress" toggle works for our needs. The key thing we found out is that the progress is only reset when a new course version is uploaded. At first blush we thought this toggle would always reset the learner's progress (like if they simply left the course), but we found out that isn't the case.

It looks like that toggle will detect if a learner has old suspend data related to an old version of the course, and if the toggle is turned on it'll reset all the learner's suspend and bookmarking information when they next launch the course (resetting the course completely).

We also noticed what seems to break things (like Andrew mentioned above) - Lesson ID's and course structure.

For Lesson ID's we found that if we duplicated the course all the ID's would change completely. But if we only edited lessons in the original course the ID's would remain the same! I think there was another suggestion around here somewhere before to use the duplicate feature for keeping archives of older versions, and keep the original course to make updates in. A bit backwards from the norm, but now we know why!

So the lesson ID's only remain the same in the original course. And if you duplicate the lesson inside the course, the duplicate receives a new ID (which makes sense). So why doesn't Articulate store the ID's in user suspend data though? No idea, but we suspect it has something to do with supporting the older SCORM standards (they had some seriously strict suspend data limits). The lesson ID's on a large course would chew into a lot of suspend data storage space.

In our experience we found that as long as we made edits to the original course, and ensured that Reset Learner Progress was enabled, if a learner had old suspend data for a previous version it would bring them back to the start of the lesson and reset all progress.

A huge help to us for figuring this out was for us to enable the LMS debugging. When we ran into the blank page on version update problem the debugging log had some helpful text that showed why it wasn't resetting things. Wish I could remember what it said though...it's been a while, sorry.

We also wondered why we couldn't have an option to either reset the progress (if a learner encounters an error loading the course), or to keep the suspend data and location (if it's a new version but doesn't run into an issue). But when we started to think about things the complexity on choosing when to restart a course and when to let a learner use old learner data started to ramp up and made for some slightly grumpy Instructional Designers on our end.

It'd be amazing if there were some standards for eLearning that handled course versioning logic/rules so none of us would run into this problem in the first place, but sadly it looks like that was never done.