Storyline Suspend Data Compression

I wanted to share this update for our SCORM 1.2 bookmarking fix for an older LMS system that only uses SCORM 1.2. Our course size was 80 slides in 11 scenes with one final assessment and fairly text heavy as it deals with inclusive recruitment practices. 

I was able to get the course bookmarking to work 100% throughout the course by changing it to the classic player and making a few other minor modifications. I could not get the zlib compression procedure to work because the fix no longer works with SCORMDriver.js for some odd reason. At least for me and I tested it about 5 times.

Even when using the classic player with HTML5/Flash as suggested by Articulate, the index_lms_html5.html still points to SCORMDriver.js and not the api.js file. When I made the changes according to the procedure above, the course would always start back at the main slide. For expediency, I decided to just try changing a few player settings and other things recommended in the community to see if that would work. And it did!

The idea about reducing the suspend data was the key to my success. In order to do that, I changed the course player back to the old version (Classic Player) and set all the slides to ‘Reset to Initial State.’ Not sure why, but the modern player seems to increase the suspend data size by 50%. The reason I can say that is that when testing with the modern player, I could only bookmark to slide 40. After changing to the classic player, I could go all the way to slide 80 and since I only have that many slides in the course, that basically doubled my suspend data size. And that is with a 10 question final assessment with correct/incorrect feedback of at least a paragraph each.

From my point of view, the classic player does not affect the appearance of our course that much because we are using custom navigation icons. It's worth the slight cosmetic changes and we gained full bookmarking from the change. I would be curious to know why the new modern player affects the suspend data size so much.

I performed the following steps in my final test (Test 8)

1.            First, set slide properties for all slides to:

                a.            Slides advances: By User

                b.            When revisiting: Reset to Initial State

2.            Next, change the course player to the classic version

3.            Then disable (uncheck) all player tab options: resources, menu, glossary, notes, title, volume, seekbar, accessibility, logo, captions

4.            On the Other tab (gear icon), set Player size to: Scale player to fill browser window

5.            For Resume on restart, set to: Always Resume.

6.            Click OK to save player.

7.            Click Save to save player options to course file.

8.            On Triggers panel, confirm there are no extra project variables in the course that are not being used. If use count is 0, delete those.

9.            On Slide Properties panel, uncheck Slide Navigation and gestures for all slides. (You will need to click through each slide to be sure the Prev, Next buttons are not enabled. Otherwise, it will show duplicate navigation ( if you are using custom navigation).

10.          Save File

11.          Publish Settings:

                a.            Formats: HTML5 Only

                b.            Player: Classic – Storyline Player

                c.             Quality: Optimized for standard delivery

                d.            Publish: Entire project

                e.            Tracking: Results slide (11.12 Quiz Results)

                f.             LMS: SCORM 1.2

12.          Reporting and Tracking

                a.            LMS Reporting: Passed/Failed

                b.            Tracking Options: Check when the learner completes a quiz

                c.             11.12 Quiz Results- Final Assessment

13.          Click Publish

14.          Save to ZIP

15.          Save Project file.

I tested it twice using SCORM Cloud with the same results. I hope this procedure helps you and I look forward to learning of new compression procedures for Storyline 360.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Michael