Plateau 6.3

Hello,

We are currently on Plateau 5.8 and have looked into 6.x as an upgrade.

From the research we've done, the  SCORM api hasn't changed between the two versions so there shouldn't be any issues with courses that work in one and the other (if you're using SCORM 1.2.. I didn't look into 2004 or Aicc as we don't use that extensively).

Captivate works on our system but we do occasionally have issues.

Most issues we do have appear to be caused by:

1> Too many slides in a course (resume data begins to overload the api).

2> General hammering of the API at every course action leading to high latency in course->API->LMS calls.

3> Older versions of captivate (I think 3 and below) don't always work well if a course has bookmarking and a quiz (as their answers, even if wrong, get saved in the resume so they can't retake it.

4> New versions of captivate (5+) not reporting to the user if the api can't be found (for example if the user has a java issue and the api can't load.. captivate just lets the user go through the course with no idea that they are not getting progress recorded). Hoping theres a checkbox our captivate users can click to re-enable this (I don't have captivate myself, but test plenty courses that use it).

These issues are not Plateau specific, though, as I can see them occuring in the ADL test suite and SCORMcloud.

Issues 1 and 2 manifest in a couple ways.. Users not getting a completion, no bookmark being saved, or seeing the "course initializing" screen when trying to relaunch it (with a bookmark) but never getting into the course.

It looks like the API is so backed up trying to set values (especially resume data) that when a user exits a course and either closes the LMS window (or browses to the catalog etc) before it's caught up that they may experience issues getting completion/bookmark set correctly. In the case of "course initializing" I believe the resume data itself becomes corrupt and captivate doesn't know how to deal with the data.

However...

I just saw this in the forum today when researching an issue and may look into implementing it as a solution with our captivate developers:

http://blogs.adobe.com/captivate/2011/04/a-new-way-to-report-scores-to-the-lms-from-your-captivate-courses.html

This appears to limit the amount of interactions/resume data calls till the point where the user closes the course, hopefully reducing a lot of the API latency I see.

I have not, however,  checked to see if there are any periodic bookmarks to prevent having to restart completely if a user accidently closes the LMS window or forgets they were taking a course. I prefer people don't create courses with 70+ slides/interactions but it's not easy to conrol that.

Basically... if you have Captivate 4+ and the courses don't contain too many slides and you configure publish them with the right settings.. they should work.

Hope that's somewhat helpful..