SCORM 1.2 Suspend Data--Seems Wonky to My Pea Brain

Most LMS vendors have to deal with content vendors and authoring tools that
conform to SCORM in various degrees and allow more data than what the
specification defines for Suspend Data in SCORM and Core Lesson in AICC.
If an LMS vendors is hard nosed about the size of Suspend Data, and you
have lots of content you are developing and/or use 3rd party content where
the expected LMS adaptability to be able to support larger than allows
field size, you will want to assess either using a different LMS if you
cannot keep the size of Suspend data under the size limits.

I suggest you engage the Docebos support team to see if they are strict
about the Suspend Data field size or not. A 2nd question is whether they
can provide some type of API log of actual course to LMS communication. A
3rd question to ask them is whether they have the ability to reset course
tracking user to a previous suspend state as that is a whole let better
than having them redo the entire course and hope the issue the user
experience does not re-occur. That is a sure fire way to lose confidence
in the quality of the content and in the LMS if not well managed.

Articulate, to their credit, makes a good faith effort to keep Suspend Data
to the standard size limit using an encryption method of suspend data to
shrink the file. This approach does have limitations as the compression and
decompression has to work at the quality of the connection and if one bit
gets jacked in movement the entire suspend data might break how the course
tracks. If I may complain a little, prior to encrypting the data,
Articulate would use 1s and 0s to indicate tracking of slides which made it
easier to support Articulate as if a course was not tracking it would be
pretty easy to identify the slides that might need some correction.

While your guidance from others suggests there is some corruption in the
suspend data, which is a rather reasonable starting point, you still need
to assess if the problem is in the course design (maybe some interaction
created a javascript error which breaks communication to the API under some
uses), the user environment where a post back to the LMS did not go through
or only partially went through, or in the LMS itself such as a load problem
because you sent out an email to 30,000 users and you have a stampede to
the server. There are a lot of imperfections and failure points in this
ecosystem to manage, but the key thing is your strategies for management.
Your LMS vendor should be an essential partner in problem resolution, even
if the problem is in the content or environment, and should be able to
guide you to further narrow the failure point with tools and expertise.

Good luck and hope this is helpful.

Regards

[image: photo]
*Philip Baruch*
Senior Partner/CLO, MaxIT Corporation

413-441-3704

www.maxit.com

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