Forum Discussion
SCORM 1.2 Suspend Data--Seems Wonky to My Pea Brain
For the last couple of weeks I've been working on a SCORM 1.2 resume issue for a Storyline 2 course that I'm trying to finish up on for a client. I posted on this previously but that post appears n...
So while folks here are trying to figure out how to live in the size limit imposed by standards conformance, it is my view this is solving the wrong problem.
I would recommend you engage the LMS Vendor to resize the Core_Lesson or Suspend_Data attribute in their database to a much larger size. If the vendor will not do that, change vendors.
Compressing of the tracking data is a bad solution as it increases by orders of magnitude the complexity of supporting e-learning content that is showing tracking problems because the suspend data is not readable. Sooner or later you bump into a size limit if the course gets too big. When the data is not compressed you can compare data from a person who completed the course to someone who has not completed the course. Storage is cheap.
We support AbilityLMS where it's database was increased to support much bigger sizes and Articulate is like the John Deere commercial where Articulate produced courses just work and when we see Articulate technology we know there will be not be any support problems in tracking. I also much prefer for the course developer as a best practice to use expressive variables as someone has to support the course after the developer has moved on, of if it has been some time since the developer worked on the course, Text_Box# is a lot more expressive than T#.
It is simply a poor excuse by the LMS vendor not to be willing to increase the size of these fields. It is not an issue in standards conformance, it is an issue in supporting the customer.
One word of caution in SCORM CLOUD is the fact it is a stable and controlled environment. It is not the real world of your users running the training at peek times, when anti-virus or some other process jumps the CPU to 100%, when users have 30 browser windows open and all the other things users and local environments do that might introduce instability into the operating environment. There is a place for SCORM CLOUD for sure; however, the better LMS vendors support real-time logging of all course to LMS communication.
