Hi. Hoping someone can help. I have built a suite of courses for a client using a totara LMS, Scorm 1.2. These are pretty simple courses, typically a few pages with the basic interactions, with no assessments. Currently, the courses complete on all components completing on all pages (I’m not currently using the attainment extension). I’ve tested on Scorm Cloud and they complete in all the testing I’ve done. Now then… The problem is these courses complete for most users but not all. For the users that have the problem, the client can log in as the them and see all the pages are at 100% within the course but the LMS does not reflect this.
I’ve seen a few comments about using the attainment extension as a way people have got round similar issues. So I would have to tick all the components in the course within the extension… Is this a more fail proof way for the course to pass the completion status to the LMS?
Or maybe I could show a popup when the course completes (think this is possible) to say well done etc and show a close button for the user to click to maybe force the completion status to the LMS?
If the course completion is triggering when you use the tools in Live Preview to check it, and it is working consistently in SCORM Cloud, then a user/Totara issue looks most likely.
I used to get this on Moodle all the time and it’s hecka frustrating.
What we determined is that it’s likely some people were closing the intermediary LMS window that is basically the courses’ connection to SCORM - before they took or finished the course, which meant that although the course was recording it’s completion, it was unable to tell the LMS that it was finished. Either that, or the user left the window open for longer than the LMS’ timeout, and then came back and completed the course, meaning the connection had been severed and they weren’t made aware, so they finished the course but no completion was sent.
I advise that you check the Totara settings, that the timeout is good and long, that you make sure that there is a message saying do not close this window on the launch page, and that you mention in the course at the beginning some things to make sure that the user knows not to close the previous window or to let the course timeout.
Thanks for your quick reply, Helen. Really appreciate it.
I have passed your message on to the client so will see what comes next.
Just out of interest, if the user has to click on the close button, in a popup with the attainment extension enabled, to close the course (obviously they can still close the browser window if they really want to) does this “force” a completion status to the LMS? I’m trying to remember back to my Kineo days and am sure this was always the favoured way of closing a course down rather than relying on the browser close button.
No it doesn’t. If the popup has been triggered, completion will have already been sent to the LMS. However, just because the course has sent it, doesn’t mean the LMS will have received it - many things can go wrong at that point, one of which Helen has listed above.
Personally I would always advise any course developer to keep the ‘completion criteria’ as simple as possible (i.e. I would personally avoid using ‘all components completed’) and, ideally, ensure that the learner has some way of being notified that the course has sent completion to the LMS. The Course Attainment extension popup is one way of doing that - but you might also like to delve into using Logic for completion as that offers a lot more flexibility.
Thanks @Matt_Leathes. Yeh I’m good ta, enjoying the freelance world (I think!). Hope you are too.
Thanks for the reply. I will go down the attainment extension route to show the completion popup when all the components have been “done”. Have done a test on this, this morning and works well on scorm cloud for me. And will see what the client comes back with, with regards the LMS settings.