Forum Discussion
Blank screen after update
Sure I have seen this mentioned in the forum before but I cannot locate it now (the search function is awful).
If I update my content and re-export it to SCORM, after updating the content on my LMS people who have previously launched the content (and not completed the module) are presented with a blank screen when they re-launch (the updated content). This is an issue unique to Rise courses. Please advise if this is a known / replicatable issue. And if there is something that can be done to resolve.
Yes, this is a big deal that needs to be addressed. Updates to RISE E-learning courses after LMS publication should be a routine occurrence. Instead it's a real pain trying to make a simple text change and replacing the SCORM/ republishing while still keeping the existing course completions intact. Dear Articulate team, please fix this.
Any updates on this? I have 22 courses that needed updating and can no longer be uploaded into the LMS. I have no idea what to do now.
Emma, which LMS system do you use? Do you have direct access to it's database? Maybe I can help.
This is still happening in 2023..
Using Moodle LMS and we have to set the SCORMpackage to force a new try for the user when launching the scorm file. This isnt a good solution for our bigger courses tho.
Any updates?
BTW, the fix mentioned in this thread by Rob and Michael. No longer works. I use moodle.
cheers
Did you try the fix that I suggested in this thread? It involves deleting user's lesson location, but not their progress. If you don't have direct access to your Moodle database, you can achieve the same thing with Configurable reports Moodle plugin, I believe.
Chris - just a note - the fix I mentioned for SCORM 1.2 still works for us in Moodle. The location of "function SCORM_GetBookmark()" in scormdriver.js has changed, but the change that needs to be made to it is the same and still works in Moodle and presumably in other standard LMSes. (We tested in SCORMCloud and TalentLMS, for example.)
1. Unzip the Rise SCORM 1.2 zip package and locate the file scormdriver.js in the /scormdriver folder. Open scormdriver.js in Notepad or other text editor.
3. Locate this function, and in particular, the portion of the line in bold below:
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 "";}
Basically, you're replacing return SCORM_CallLMSGetValue("cmi.core.lesson_location"); with return ""; which just tells Articulate *not* to retrieve the bookmark.
The result is that while all the learner completion and progress status has been retained (and shows on the left side Rise menu), it always causes Rise to restart subsequent sessions at the opening page.
Once you've made the change, 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, Michael, and thanks for the code in your reply. Just to clarify as I have little to no knowledge on this. If I go into the .js file I'd be taking the string:
function
SCORM_GetBookmark(){WriteToDebug("In SCORM_GetBookmark");SCORM_ClearErrorInfo();return SCORM_CallLMSGetValue("cmi.core.lesson_location")}
And replacing the whole string with:SCORM_GetBookmark(){WriteToDebug("In SCORM_GetBookmark");SCORM_ClearErrorInfo();return "";}
thus basically ''just'' deleting the scorm_callLMSGetValue("cmi.core.lesson.location") ?Would that be the correct way of doing it, and that would force the scorm to restart at the opening page (negating the blank screen error) and the lessons that would be marked as completed would still be marked in the menu?
Articulate Team, is there any fix to this issue? Whenever a new SCORM is uploaded to the LMS, users cannot view the Rise content and the screen shows blank. Also, users who have previously launched the content (and have not completed the SCORM) are also presented with a blank screen instead of the new SCORM. I need to manually delete previous attempts in order for the user to view the new SCORM content. As of now it only occurs with Rise 360.
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.Hi, just following up on this thread. We have had the blank screen problem on both of our LMS (Moodle 3.9 and a bespoke elearning system). Thank you to Michael Getz and ADA Egret for your posts - they have helped us understand the problem. We have moved to using a base course for development/ updates and are now duplicating the course with the duplicates assigned as backup courses. We no longer get the blank screen issue when we update the course in either LMS.
We have however identified another issue as a result of testing how Rise works when we have published a course and then updated it at a later date.
We have created a number of versions, all building on a 'base' test course:
- Version 1.0: Base course - 4 sections: Introduction; Background, Funding and Summary. Each section contains 3 or 4 lessons
- Version 1.1: Introduction section - a lesson updated to include 3 new blocks
- Version 1.2: Introduction section - added a lesson (duplicated)
We uploaded version 1.0 to Moodle. Logged in as a test user - completed the introduction section and the 3 lessons. Started the second section; first lesson and then exited the course. Everything worked as expected; the lesson completion data for each of the three lessons in the introduction section were displayed as completed.
We updated the course with version 1.1 where a lesson had been expanded to include the 3 new blocks. Logged back in using the test user account. The lesson completion data for each of the three lessons in the introduction section were displayed as completed - as you would expect. The bookmarking worked as expected - user returned to second section; first lesson.
We updated the course with version 1.2; where we had added a lesson into the introduction section expanding it from 3 to 4 lessons. The lesson was added in as the third lesson of the four.
Logged back in using the test user account. The bookmarking worked as expected - user returned to second section; first lesson.
The lesson completion data for three of the lessons in the introduction section were displayed as completed - however this included the new lesson being flagged as completed (which the user had not completed) and the (originally third) forth lesson (which had been completed by the user) now flagged as not completed.
We wondered whether this is because the cmi.suspend_data is identified by section / lesson order and not by Rise lesson id?
We have 35 courses that we are planning to develop using Rise, that we will be used by over 3000 users. We update our courses more than once per year, we would like to be able to update/ expand the courses while maintaining the lesson completion data for our users.
We would appreciate comments/ thoughts on the above.
Hi Paul,
We also have Moodle 3.9 and are running into this problem quite frequently. Having approx 80 000 users, it's quite the hassle.
But you said you're not running into this problem anymore with having a ''base'' course and duplicates as backup courses? I didnt quite understand how that worked exactly? You have a base / main course from where you do all your updates and export, but what purpose do the duplicates then serve? And wouldnt you run into the blank error if the changes on the base course were too big / severe that it messed up the location messaging in the scorm?
I might've missed something quite basic, sorry if thats the case.
The duplicate courses are backups of the course that we are developing (e.g. something goes wrong we have a copy of the previous version). We looked at the lesson id of the 'base' course and could see that they remained consistent for a given lesson when we added new lessons to a section. The lesson ids change for all lessons when you duplicate a course. Its the change in lesson ids that causes the blank screen - hence the need to stick with the 'base' version of the course.
What we are finding is that the lesson progress data is not accurately recorded (see post). We have received an email from Articulate this week stating that:
"Articulate have designed their courses so that when course files within an existing course are updated in a LMS or Web server, learners who previously started the course won't be able to resume where they left off. While as described, there are some situations in which the LMS can preserve the learner data while updating the course, it isn't a guarantee that their courses will work each time after the update. That is because the course structure changes each time you make changes to it, especially when removing or adding lessons to the course."
Clearly this is a bit of problem and seems to be an issue with the scorm 1.2 data limitation (Articulate 360 - Articulate Studio: Exceeding SCORM Suspend Data Limits - Articulate Support).
We have tested updating the 'base' course adding / remove lessons / restructuring and the course works when you upload it to the LMS - the lesson progression data doesn't. We are now at the stage of adding in the java script update (see this thread) that results in the course always opening at the overview page. The aim is to use the overview page to post messages to learners providing advice on the updates along with instructions.
Happy to meet up via teams if you would like to discuss further. P
@Michael Getz, thank you for this tip! One year later and it has just saved my e-learning developer's sanity (and made me the hero).
