Rise Articulate SCORM Package not loading

Hello everyone,

Please allow me to share what I currently know about this issue. To my knowledge, this kind of issue happens when an LMS updates a course package, but maintains old student resume data. Sadly, course package versioning is outside the scope of AICC/SCORM/xAPI/cmi5, so there are no standards for LMS vendors or eLearning authoring vendors to follow when updating an existing course package (you might see where this is already going).

Because there's no standards, whenever an LMS allows for the updating of course packages for students who are still in-progress, there's always going to be some wiggle room for problems to occur. There's no standards for anyone to follow, after all! What do you do with old student data? What do you do with old course package version data? These are questions with currently no standardized answers within the eLearning industry, which leads to where we are now.

I've found that when you export a newly modified Rise course the structure of the course can easily become changed. Old lessons can easily get new IDs (like mentioned in Darren's original post). Most LMSs out there recognize this potential for a "desync" between old student data and new course content, and so most LMSs will automatically deleted old attempt data in order to give the student a new attempt from scratch when they next launch the course (if the LMS even supports updating existing course content for in-progress students in the first place). I've found that this is how SCORM Cloud usually works. It'll erase old student data from packages that are updated.

I believe this is why the "Reset Learner Progress" feature was added. If the course somehow detects a desync between the newly published course, and the old student data, it will reset the learner's progress and manually clear out the old student data and resume the course.

It's sadly doing the best it can, with no standards that exist. I have noticed that on occasion if you make some very minor edits in the original course, that Rise can sometimes resume with no problem! That's why I believe the "Reset Learner Progress" is a toggle, and not always enabled. Some course updates do actually work without the need to clobber previous student attempt data!

I've run into this kind of problem with Moodle before in the past, too (got around it by using the Reset Learner Progress toggle). There's no easy fix for it that I could find in all my years of researching the problem. Without any standards in the industry on how to update a course package in an LMS (and handle the old student data) these kinds of issues will always persist. :(