Is a 'close' course button actually needed and saving progress

General Help
1

I’m looking to get some clarification on saving course progress and reopening courses again.

I have a course with content locking. To progress from one page to the next, all components must be completed. There is no logic in the course, and I have the Bookmarking extension turned on, and Course Assessment and Course Attainment. I’ve exported it to the LMS as xAPI.

All the locking works fine when viewed via the LMS, however, if I close the pop-up course browser window, then reopen the course again all the pages are locked. Basically, I have to go through every component and unlock all the pages again. BUT, if I work through the entire course and complete the end-of-course assessment, close the course and then reopen it, everything remains unlocked as it should (whether I pass or fail the assessment)

The LMS support has said:

If you don’t have an explicit 'exit’ button that triggers the module to return the SCORM suspend data then it has to be done when the window is closed (ideally it’s best to have an exit button and for both to do it).

The difficultly returning the SCORM suspend data when closing the browser window is that there may not be time to send the data before the window breaks its connection with the LMS. To avoid this the module should send the suspend data back to the LMS at regular intervals. It may only be sent when the final assessment is completed which would explain why closing the window at that stage doesn’t take you back to the first section of the module again.

Evolve have advised using their new Beta Extension “Local Storage” to store course data to the browser but this, and what the LMS support are saying just seems really complicated. Also what happens if the learner uses both desktop and mobile devices to access the course - if progress data is stored locally in a browser then course progress wont sync between devices.

I’m still fairly new to Evolve and my knowledge of how LMS works is limited so could someone clarify whether this is typical and how they would approach this situation?

Thanks in advance and for reading such a long post.

2

Hi darkcurv!

If you have the Bookmarking extension on, and the course still isn’t saving progress when you exit it, and then re-open, just try exporting the course as a SCORM 1.2 file with Advanced Tracking enabled.

Test it again within the LMS to see if it works.

If Bookmarking and progress is saved, but any Multiple-Choice Questions can’t be re-interacted with, then that would suggest, to me, a Suspend Data limit issue in the LMS.

We are also currently using an LMS with a small Suspend Data limit, and this is the behavior exhibited when courses/packages are generating more Suspend Data than the LMS allows.

The only “solution,” and it’s already mentioned in the reply from LMS support, is to enable the Local Storage Extension in addition to Publishing as a SCORM 1.2 package.

But then, as they have also mentioned, the course no longer becomes device (or even browser) agnostic.

The LMS we use doesn’t accept the SCORM 2004 format, so I don’t have any experience or data to share about how that type of package would potentially interact with your LMS.

Although there is no Logic in the course, I think there is still Suspend Data usage to track Component and Page completions, especially with Bookmarking on.

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