Issue: Rise 360 courses in languages with Cyrillic alphabets exported to cmi5 can't store data to LMS

Hello, team!

We have stumbled upon an issue which we first thought to be a minor bug (and discussed as such with Articulate staff), but it turns out that this is a repeatable issue specific to non-Latin alphabets, in our case with Russian language, so I have decided to share our experience in case other Articulate users might comment or provide a workaround.

We create e-courses in Rise 360 for clients in Russia and, naturally, we export them in the desired standard. We have rarely encountered any significant issues with SCORM 1.2, 2004 and xAPI (usually resolved on the client's side with LMS settings), but the cmi5 is where we hit a rock.

I have captured a Peek video of this. Long story short, all the cmi5 verbs are sent correctly, yet the SCORM Cloud doesn't save the scores. The only score which is saved is the Total Time, and only during launches subsequent to the first (during the first launch the Total Time data is not saved).

We have tested some options with course languages and Label translations. All the test courses were in cmi5, tracked Quiz result and sent Passed/Incomplete to LMS.

We've got these results:

1) Course in Russian, Labels in Russian: data is not stored in LMS

2) Course in Russian, Labels in English: data is not stored in LMS

3) Course in English, Labels in Russian: data stored succesfully in LMS

4) Course in English, Labels in English: data stored succesfully in LMS

So the hypothesis would be that as of 09 December 2020, the usage of Cyrillic alphabet in Rise 360 prevents the course from sending the (correctly gathered) cmi5 verbs to the LMS.

The same courses with the same language profiles work well if exported to xAPI/TinCan, and the issue is not linked with neither Lesson names (tested with placeholder word in Arabic) nor Labels (Labels in different languages work consistently).

This issue is probably there since the introduction of the option in August 2020 and was not discovered because there are other viable exporting options. In our case, it was the Client's wish to specifically use cmi5, and to discover that it doesn't work with our courses was a bummer.

In the bigger picture, due to Articulate's presence in Cyrillic-language markets, this can have an impact on the expansion of the newest e-Learning standard in the region, OR, which would probably be of interest to Articulate executives, can be one of the reasons more clients opt for a well-known local competitor who doesn't have those language-related problems despite offering somewhat lesser functionality than Rise. 

I hope my post will provide an insight on this admittedly niche issue, because we are many, we are looking forward for more e-Learning content and we like what Rise 360 has to offer :). And, of course, I personally would like an ETA on this fix, if it will ever be implemented.

 

Thank you!

Phil

 

P.S. While we're at it, this is not the only Language-related problem. The Lato font of the Table of Contents and Labels hard-coded into the Rise 360 exported zips does not have Cyrillic symbols, and it looks messy if not changed. It would be nice to have the option to change this font in the settings (it is not linked with the Custom fonts menu), because renaming five different Roboto.woffs into Lato.woffs and manually replacing them in the lib/fonts directory feels very dated.