Forum Discussion

RocioSaracho's avatar
RocioSaracho
Community Member
6 years ago

What are the things that affect resume where you left off and suspend_data?

I've spent a significant amount of time trying to figure out what are the things that affect the suspend_data element in Articulate. 

I have a course in which the Resume where you left-off functionality doesn't work.

Once the course reaches a specific slide, it always comes back to that slide and never resumes past that point, even if I exit the course from another slide or a different scene. It always just saves progress up-to the same specific point.

I published the course with "On Restart: Always Resume" and "On Restart: Prompt to Resume" and tested both configurations both on SCORM Cloud and our LMS and get the exact same behaviour. So I know this is not a "restriction from our LMS"

I submitted a ticket with my source file, and the only options that I've been given so far are:

1) Publish to SCORM 2004 - Not an option (our LMS only supports SCORM 1.2)

2) Remove the functionality - Not a solution

3) Delete some slides - If it was just the number of slides that determined the length of the suspend_data element of the Storyline SCORM package, none of my courses would work. I have courses with more slides than this one, and none of them have these issue.  Deleting slides seems like an over-simplified non-realistic fix. 

I'd like to know if someone has an understanding of what are the things that affect the suspend_data element.

I was able to set up an LMS debug file and observed how the suspend_data element grows as I move through my slides - and my course does reach the SCORM 1.2 limit of 4096 and spits the intSCORMError = 405

https://community.articulate.com/discussions/articulate-storyline/scorm-1-2-suspend-data-seems-wonky-to-my-pea-brain

I tried to set many slides and layers to Reset to Initial State,  which seem to help a bit. It allows a bit more room for suspend_data to grow, but it simply makes another slide the one from which you have to resume later in the course, Still doesn't work, but at least "more" progress is saved.

It would be good to hear if anyone has found other things that have helped with the resume where you left off non working. 

Seems like there are several of the same issues without a solution.

  • GerryWasiluk's avatar
    GerryWasiluk
    Community Member

    What happens if, instead of using the default question text box for the quiz question's text, you put something in it like "Q1" for question 1 and then move that offscreen.  Then add the question as a new text box.

  • PeterMoore1's avatar
    PeterMoore1
    Community Member

    Hi Rocio - I woudn't have expected to see this occur on a piece with only 12 questions!  Almost feels like something may be broken?...I looked back on the course I built a couple of years ago around the time I first saw this problem.  It's a completely assessment driven piece so there are frequent question slides scattered throughout. 11 scenes and 33 questions all up but they are all freeform questions with lots of feedback layers and triggers to present custom feedback and coaching for each choice the participant makes. All the question slides are set to 'reset to initial state'  but not all the other non-question slides or layers, (although I do make this setting now)  This published successfully with SCORM 1.2 and 'prompt to resume' set.

    This would seem to support the comment that Phil made above re free form questions.  Unfortunately, none of this helps you directly with resolving the issue for the piece you are working on...wish I had some deeper wisdom to light this up a bit more for you.

  • RocioSaracho's avatar
    RocioSaracho
    Community Member

    You were absolutely on track with your responses. Thanks a lot.

    I turns out our template for the assessment questions was indeed using freeform questions, so I've changed most of them to the built-in graded questions.

    From what I have observed just one freeform question is extremely problematic, even if setting that one question slide to Reset to Initial State. 

    I'm testing other types of built-in graded questions, e.g. hot-spot or those from templates (drag-drop from Serenity). I'd like to be able to have more than just radio-buttons, but it may not be possible.

    I'll keep you posted.

  • Did some testing using SCORM Cloud to see why a build for one of our clients was resuming up to a point, but after that failing to recall any further information about slides visited or actions on slides set to 'resumed saved state'. This post was really helpful, thank you Rocia Saracho.

    As mentioned earlier here, the 'maximum suspend data size' is just 4,096 if you've published to SCORM 1.2 (released in 2001).

    Publishing to SCORM 2004 4th edition (released in 2009 - wish they had stuck with the original plan to call it SCORM 1.3) increases the maximum suspend data size to 64,000!

    Note: When you're publishing and you first select SCORM 2004 from the drop-down, at the time of writing it defaults to the original edition (as you'd expect this was released in 2004) which has a 'maximum suspend data size' of just 4000. You'll want to go in a bit deeper and select the 'Tracking and reporting' button to specify the 4th edition.

    It would be great if the latest version became the default and you had to go in deeper to choose a prior version of SCORM 2004.