Forum Discussion
What percentage of users have completion issues in your LMS, assuming the course works correctly?
How good is "good" for your LMS?
I've been a learning designer and an LMS administrator. In discussions with a former big-name LMS provider, they seem comfortable with an error rate of 1-2% of learners. In these cases, the course gets "stuck" or doesn't pass the completion to the LMS. The course design isn't the issue. It seems to be a problem related to networks and resume data, but that is very difficult to replicate and debug. Admittedly, my experience was in a multi-state company with variable degrees of connectivity.
Have you seen any benchmarking data for different LMS's? Do you see these types of issues? If so, what percentage of your learners experience issues? What does your LMS provider say about that error rate?
There are several things possibly at play here. Yes, it can be network security issues sometimes blocking the communication between the user and the server sending the completion trigger. The biggest culprit tends to be completion based on quiz results. This is not recommended as this can have issues. Use quizzes as a reinforcement during the module but pass based on slide completion. Also use Complete/Incomplete as the pass status as many LMS's do not recommend a status with pass or fail in them as this has been known ot be problematic.
Even if you do all these things, there seems to be a certain error rate. We just rolled out a long course to 30,000 people and only had 50 have a true problem (not user error). In a previous LMS with another company, they didn't see a need to troubleshoot when we'd have 50 people out of 1300 with an issue. We discovered some fixes like using SCORM 2004, deleting unused variables, avoiding resume state on slides with a lot of layers/states, etc. It is still odd that in some cases random users seem to have firewall issues maybe while many other people are just fine. This just may be one of the mysteries of life. ;)
