Forum Discussion
Everything we know about Cornerstone on Demand and Storyline!
I thought I would start a thread about Cornerstone on Demand so there's a central place for people to read and add to. There seems to be a dearth of information about how CSOD and Storyline interact with each other as well as the unresolved issues surrounding it. I've spent many hours scouring the web and speaking with Cornerstone trying to find a solution. Hopefully this thread will serve as a resource for others going forward.
On a side note, I love Articulate Storyline. I started with Adobe Captivate with limited success. It was a very steep learning curve, but I was able to get some basic functionality out of it. I tested out Storyline with it's 30 day trial, and I will say that time-to-effectiveness was drastically reduced. It really IS like using powerpoint. Granted there is less complex functionality and interactions available than Captivate, but so far it's given me everything I've needed to use. The benefit is that the learning curve is much less steep too. Think of it as the difference between iMovie and Final Cut Pro. The latter can do some crazy effects, but the former gives you 90% of what you need and can get you comfortable in 1/4 of the time.
It's nice to have a properly-working content creation tool when you're in an LMS like Cornerstone. I have enough trouble in CSOD as it is.
So some of the nuggets of wisdom that I've found are :
- Cornerstone does not track SCORM 1.2 content properly. You cannot pull a lot of the reports if they are not in SCORM 2004 format. You don't have the option to select that course in the reports.
- If you export into SCORM 2004, there will be an extra section on the left with text links to the module. This takes up 30% of the screen, and on smaller laptop screens may crowd out the module window. Cornerstone says this is a Storyline exporting settings issue. I couldn't find any settings that shows/hides that section. The workaround is to resize the module to the screen, which doesn't get rid of the section, but at least fits the module.
- When reporting, you can get the completion status for a course based on quiz result or last slide viewed. You can also get a final grade for course. Storyline passes the results information for each question (including short answer) but you cannot pull a list of the answers for an individual. Therefore, it may not be advisable to administer any testing where you'll need to review individual answers
- You can get a list of aggregate answers for a module. e.g. I can see how 100 employees answered this multiple choice question. This is helpful to determine if learners are absorbing the course information correctly.
- Web objects (such as websites, or links to sharepoint documents) work in modules if your IT has added csod.com to the trusted sites
- Popup windows that open up the articulate module in CSOD will work if you add csod.com to the allowed list for popup blockers. Your IT dept can also add this to everyone's computer. Otherwise when learners click the "launch" button, the module does not show up.
I'll post more as I think or find them, but feel free to add to this list!
Awesome! I'm glad this worked. I'll post this just in case anyone else needs to find it:
When editing a course on the "blue page" it should always be None.
Hopefully your company can switch this off for everyone. It's located in Preferences: Content Launching Preferences (by Division)
FYI - If you switched the compatibility mode Will mentioned off for everyone in content launching preferences, this setting will only apply to newly uploaded online training courses. Courses published prior to that system preferences change will still have the old compatibility setting. To change those, you would need to go into the catalog and change the drop down for each course.
What is the word regarding the Google Chrome Update 80 coming out Feb 4, 2020 and course size limitations? Could any offer any insight on the information below as to why Google Chrome is doing this and steps to take to "reduce message size" or keep "message size" under their new limit - Not sure exactly where or how to do this. Does this have anything to do with the way a course is built in Articulate? Or how the final data is sent from the course to Cornerstone? Or what? Cornerstone is clear to say this is not their doing it is Google Chrome - but it effects all cornerstone courses. (Or will it stop there?) How would I limit said message size? Any help or feed back would be graciously received. Thanks!
"Google will release Chrome version 80 on February 4, 2020. With this release, Google is making significant changes to Chrome’s Window Close behavior that will impact how online courses communicate a user’s exit and completion status to a learning platform. NOTE: There is no impact to other supported browsers, i.e. Firefox, Safari etc......We sent this announcement ......
.....In addition to the Chrome Window Close behavior, Google is making another change that will affect specific courses for you, directly.
The impact on you
Chrome version 80 will now limit the size of status and completion updates that your course can send upon Window Close. The new limit per message is 64KB. If the limit is exceeded, course status and completion will not be sent to Cornerstone and these statuses may not be accurate.
What we're doing to help
We have audited all SCORM courses and have identified the below courses within your portal that exceed the new message size limit. These courses will need to be updated to correctly track user's status and completion.
Recommended next steps
If these courses were authored within your organization, you should update them to reduce the size of the message sent to Cornerstone upon Window Close.
If these courses are purchased from a third-party, you should work directly with the provider to ensure the new limit is met.
We encourage delaying your organization's update to Chrome version 80 until you have confirmed that your content is compliant. Other web browsers are not impacted by this change.Additional resources
Disallow sync XHR in page dismissal (Links here)
Chrome Features Schedule (Links here)For more information on how to determine if the message size exceeds the limit, view this posting in the Cornerstone Success Center.
Thank you for your attention to this matter.
The Cornerstone Team"
Hi, Laura.
This Chrome change limits the size of the communication between an LMS and a course--not the size of the course itself.
The good news is that the most resource-intensive communication between an LMS and a course is
suspend_data, which is already capped at a maximum of 64 KB by even the most generous LMS standards. We've never seen a course that approaches this level of runtime data, so we anticipate no impact as a result of this Chrome change.Please let us know if you need anything else!
Thanks. That is what I understood it to mean as well. However, embedded in their message, Cornerstone audited our client's courses and came back saying one of the course we authored exceeded this limit. (I am not sure how that is possible.) And that we as the author needed to fix it. And that was not a Cornerstone issue this was a Google Chrome issue. I am not sure what next steps would be. Could you help us with the language or next steps we need to advise our client about how to proceed? Thanks! (This was a Storyline 360 course, 2004 3rd Ed.) Or maybe I need to do a private share with you.
Thanks for your reply, Laura.
A great way to inspect the communication between your LMS and your course is to enable LMS Debug Mode and check for messages that exceed 64 KB. I don't think you'll find any, but if you do, we'd love see a copy of the course for further troubleshooting!
This document from Cornerstone also shares some suggestions for testing suspend_data file size. Justin's suggestion of debug mode seems sound, but does that indicate file size of communication to LMS? Tried running in SCORM Cloud as well and am not able to find those number either.
I suppose it's worth noting that the four courses we have that appear to exceed the 64KB limit are all SL2 courses or older, so maybe a republish/update in SL360 is in order?
Hi Folks - I wanted to add an update with the only solution we have to date - 1 Cornerstone has not responded with the specific information regarding why or how this course exceeded the message limit. 2 - the client has limited ability to research it on their own and I am a lowly 3rd party supplier - with no authority to reach into their system to search on my own - I have only been tasked with fix the course so it works. (PS neither articulate nor I can get the message limit to exceed in our tests)
This is by no means the largest, longest or most media rich course we have developed for this client - but it is a lengthy course and turning off resume playback or dividing the course into smaller segments is NOT an option.
But the mantra is fix the course!
We have for the time being implemented this fabulous and off books suggestion (found posted on here under another thread:
Shout out to David Hansen: https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/storyline-suspend-data-compression
Are these issues still persistent with Cornerstone? If so, any tips for completion. We're having issues with Storyline 360 marking complete as SCORM 1.2 in Cornerstone.
Hi Heather,
To clarify, is the problem that SCORM 1.2 courses built in Storyline are having problems completing in Cornerstone?
Not sure if the structure of your course, but we had a similar issue recently and discovered that the order of actions on our final page caused the issue.
Final Page had a button to click "Click Button to Exit Course". Its associated actions were "Exit Course" followed by "Complete Course as Completed/Passed".
Simply adjusting the order of those two actions fixed the issue in Cornerstone. This was published in SCORM 1.2
If you don't have a button to close the course out, I would consider it. Closing the browser window to exit a course will sometimes interrupt the completion call to CSOD.
Based on the recent information regarding the Chrome 80 upgrade, I would avoid publishing anything in AICC.
Thanks, Robert. This was helpful. I was able to get Completion recorded during testing in SCORM Cloud after working with Articulate Support. I did add the layer for the Exit option to close the window as well. Do you know if there is a way to record completion and a grade with the Complete Button? I've not been successful with both statuses in SCORM cloud. I was able to setup completion in my own LMS with the activity completion setting in my LMS and the grade was sent to the grade report in the LMS. However, my client uses Cornerstone and cannot get the same results. Any thoughts you could share would be appreciated.
Yes. That's correct. I'm wondering if publishing to SCORM 2004 or AICC will fix the issue for our client.
Hi Heather -
We haven't seen completion issues with Storyline content in Cornerstone. We have some courses published to SCORM 1.2 but have moved to SCORM 2004 and Tin Can API for most recent published versions.
I try to avoid chaining completion to a button wherever possible. Especially when this is closely followed by an exit action.You might try adding your complete course trigger when the timeline starts on your completion slide and leaving the exit action on your button. This would send a complete course trigger with plenty of time to spare for the exit.
Also, I think the complete course trigger will only send your completion status. It won't send a score. If you want to control the score and status reporting, I've had good luck with a Javascript trigger.
