Captivate 4 - SCORM 1.2/2004 Mark as Complete in the LMS?

Report · Feb 09, 2011

Hello,

We are having a HECK of a time trying to get our courses to track properly within the LMS. Here's what we have...

The Scenario

The course contains a lot of interactions, but ALL of them are set to not be scored.
The course contains 4 question objects, but ALL of the are set to not be score. These are review questions and we don't want to know if the learner got them correct or incorrect.
We simply want to track that the learner opened the course, viewed the slides and exited the course plus the time spent within the course. So, we simply want the course to mark as complete in the LMS if the learner viewed at least 80% of the slides.

The Requirements

The course must track properly within the Rapid Intake's ClickCourse LMS. This has not been consistent with any Captivate 4 published content to date.
Since we've been having inconsistencies with tracking in the LMS, the LMS developer is telling us that the courses must pass the ADL Test Suite SCORM conformance tests.

What we've tried so far

1. Publish to SCORM 1.2 using the following settings:

Once published, I have opened the htm file and removed the first two lines of code:

Then, I open the SCORM_support/scorm_support.js file and changed the "0" in line 2 to "1".

I have also set the Flash Player privacy settings to accept the install location of the ADL Test Suite per Jan's instructions found here.

Then, when I attempt to run the course in the ADL Test Suite version 1.2.7, it fails stating ERROR: The manifest is NOT valid against the controlling documents The complete log shows a running list of ERROR after ERROR.

Although the course will not pass the ADL Conformance test, we have had the most luck with this publish method in the LMS, but it's inconsistent.

2. Publish to SCORM 2004 using the following settings:

Once published, I have opened the htm file and removed the first two lines of code:

I have also set the Flash Player privacy settings to accept the install location of the ADL Test Suite per Jan's instructions found here.

Then, when I attempt to run the course in the ADL Test Suite 2004 version 1.1.1, it passes!!! Yes!

Although the course will pass the ADL Conformance test, the course will not mark as complete in the LMS.

3. Add a button on the last slide of the course that states "Click here to receive credit" and is set to be graded and add 100 points to the score. Publish to SCORM 2004 using the following settings:

Once published, I have opened the htm file and removed the first two lines of code:

I have also set the Flash Player privacy settings to accept the install location of the ADL Test Suite per Jan's instructions found here.

Then, when I attempt to run the course in the ADL Test Suite 2004 version 1.1.1, it passes!!! Yes!

Although the course will pass the ADL Conformance test, the course will not mark as complete in the LMS even when we click the custom button.

Bottom Line

Publishing to SCORM 1.2 seems to track in the LMS inconsistently, but it will never pass the ADL Test Suite Conformancy Test.
Publishing to SCORM 2004, we can get it to pass the ADL Test Suite Conformancy Test, but it never tracks in the LMS.
We need the course to pass the ADL Test Suite AND track in the LMS. How do we do that?

Report · Feb 09, 2011

No guarantees of success here but I have a few suggestions for you if you're willing to try them:

If you want to save yourself some time making all those adjustments to the HTM files each time you publish, create a copy of the template file for the HTM and save it to the same location as your own version with the changes made. Then you can just select that template from the dropdown each time you publish.
Whenever I'm trying to get a Captivate course to work with a new LMS, I don't use a big complex course first up. I start with a very simple SCORM module that might only have a couple of slides, and a True/False question. Not only is this quicker to upload when I make changes to settings, but it's also more likely to work because there are less variables in play. So my question to you is: What happens when you just create a vanilla Captivate lesson, using your same settings for SCORM 1.2 and upload to the LMS? If you can't get even a very simple lesson to report correctly to the LMS then a very complex one isn't going to work better.
Have you checked with the LMS vendor whether or not their LMS supports SCORM 2004 or only 1.2? It would seem from your post that perhaps it doesn't otherwise you would have just been able to use the 2004 settings that passed the ADL test.
Have you checked with the LMS vendor whether or not their LMS supports Complete/Incomplete or only Pass/Fail? (Believe it or not, some LMSs don't do Complete/Incomplete.)
Have you tried changing the setting to Report to LMS as Percent instead of Score? I find % works better for some especially if you're asking it to evaluate against a target percentage.
Try turning off every optional item in the SCORM manifest. E.g. don't put anything for Mastery score, time allowed, time limit action, launch data, duration, subject, etc. The more data you throw at an LMS the shakier they get in some cases. If they don't know what to do with the data they sometimes just stop dead in their tracks...with no useful explanation as to what they tripped over.

The method comes down to this: Fnd the minimum settings that work for the simplest SCO lesson you can build, and then work up from there to more complex tasks. E.g. Start with a single SCO SCORM and when you get that to work, try a Multi-SCO of the same modules.

Don't believe everything your LMS vendor tells you. They're usually very quick to blame the authoring tools if it gets them off the hook. Captivate is renowned for doing a pretty good job of achieving SCORM compliance. But not every LMS speaks the lingo of SCORM with the same dialect. In fact some are very tongue-tied.

Also, don't believe that just because a Captivate lesson fails the ADL SCORM Test Suite means that it's not SCORM compliant. That test suite is very old now and was originally written for HTML-based courses, not multimedia Flash-based courses like Captivate churns out.

Interested to see whether any of this works for you.

Report · Feb 09, 2011

Hi RodWard,

Thanks for the reply!

I'll tackle each bullet at a time.

I do want to save myself some time and I will attempt to make those modifications to the htm file. Although, I'm not sure where it's located, where I need to store the modified htm file and how to select it in the publish settings.
It's funny that you should mention smaller courses. Before my client select this particular LMS, I used Captivate to create a small test case course. It was published using option #1 that I posted above (SCORM 1.2, Slide views only, etc.) This test case worked in their LMS so I thought everything was good to go. Fast forward 4 months later, 16 LARGE Captivate courses later, and the tracking has been inconsistent. Note that I, myself, have NEVER had the tracking fail for me, but they have reports of it not tracking for their learners. So, the LMS developers have been asked to help troubleshoot and they blame Captivate. They also have informed my client that the ADL Test Suite is the golden standard and if the course cannot pass that test, they cannot guarantee that it will work within their LMS. So, the obligation to make it work falls back on me.
The LMS Vendor claims that it supports both SCORM 1.2 & 1.3 (2004). In fact, they also sell an eLearning authoring platform (that I use and am very happy with). It exports courses using Flash & XML into AICC, SCORM 1.2 or SCORM 2004. When testing courses from their authoring platform in all of the various tracking methods, it does work within their LMS. So, I know their LMS is SCORM 1.2 & 2004 compliant.
Complete/Incomplete or Pass/Fail should work within their LMS. I have tested it with their authoring tool and verified it.
I have not changed the setting to Report to LMS as Percent instead of Score because I didn't want to confuse the learner if they looked at their transcript in the LMS and saw a completion, but a percentage lower than 100%. I will try to switch it to percent and see what happens. Especially in the case where the "Click here to receive credit" button is available.
I have zero optional items in the SCORM manifest options. They are all set to default of nothing.

"Captivate is renowned for doing a pretty good job of achieving SCORM compliance."

It is? That hasn't been my experience so far. At my last place of employment, we used the SumTotal LMS and vendors would supply Captivate courses all the time and we had to send them back to the vendor because of issues like this. To be honest, we used the ADL test suite as our gauge for vendor supplied courseware before we would even allow it into the LMS.

My only other option is to chop up the course into SEVERAL smaller chunks, publish those smaller chunks into non-SCORM swfs, and then import those swfs as pages in the other eLearning authoring platform, publish to SCORM there and it will work. But that's a LOT of work. About 3 or 4 hours per course and we have about 32 courses. And I know that Captivate is SUPPOSED to work properly. That's why this has been so frustrating.

I will try the percent option and see if that helps.

Report · Feb 09, 2011

I have just completed some further testing.

Created a new course in Captivate. Did a little 800x600 screen record in demo mode. Went into each slide and removed any interactivity. So, the course is 5 slides long and simply plays from beginning to end. Easy enough test case.

Published to SCORM 1.2.

Made the post-publishing changes to the htm and scorm_support.js file.

Tested it in the SCORM 1.2 ADL Test Suite. It failed.

I zipped it up and uploaded it to the LMS. Played the course. It tracked and marked it as complete just as it should.

Published the same course to SCORM 2004.

Made the post-publishing changes to the htm file.

Tested it in the SCORM 2004 ADL Test Suite. It passed with flying colors.

I zipped it up and uploaded it to the LMS. Played the course. It did not track or mark it as complete.

This test confirms the same issue that I am having with my, much larger, captivate courses.

So, at this point, one would be inclined to say, "Forget about ADL Test Suite for SCORM 1.2 and just use that because it's tracking properly." But, my client is claiming that it isn't tracking properly consistently. And if it doesn't pass the ADL Test Suite, the burden is on me to get it working.

Report · Feb 09, 2011

I still wouldn't be too hasty to say that the fault with the courses tracking inconsistently is automatically due to some flaw in Captivate's output, especially if you've been able to get it to track reliably on your end. As you can see, the ADL Test Suite isn't a perfect solution either.

I'm assuming you have no control over the end user PC platform or server environment. And so far, your client doesn't appear to have provided you with numbers or much detail about what they mean when they say "it doesn't track reliably". How many users are experiencing this issue? What's the exact nature of the problem? What browsers and Flash Player versions are they on? Do they make sure the module is allowed to play right to the end and complete its communication with the LMS before the playing window is closed? Etc, etc.

I had one client claiming problems with LMS integration and blaming my content. When I asked to speak to the end-users that were experiencing the issues and was able to actually watch them interact with the course content, I found that in some cases it was caused by simple user error (e.g. they were shutting down the player window before the SCORM API communication had a chance to finalise), or they were on the wrong version of Flash Player (in some cases the content wasn't playing at all but the user reported it as inconsistent tracking), or they were getting questions wrong because they didn't read the questions and blamed the system because they didn't pass.

My point is that unless you can get access to the people that are experiencing these issues, you are totally in the dark about what is happening or why. You could chase your tail forever trying to debug this from a distance.

Report · Feb 10, 2011

Hi Chet,

I think you need to split this up in 2 separate issues:

validating your package in the ADL Test Suite: I have replicated your first scenario (scorm 1.2) with a very simple Captivate package. When I run this through the ADL Test Suite 1.2.7 on my Windows 7 64bit pc, I get the same validation errors as you get. I installed a fresh Windows XP workstation, with the ADL Test Suite, and the same package validates correctly! So I suspect that the (relatively old) test suite is not very reliable on Windows 7. If you get a chance, I would try to test in Windows XP (or Windows 7 XP mode maybe).
testing the communication between the Captivate package and the LMS: this can of course be an LMS related issue, but I do agree with others in the forum that the communiation between Captivate and LMS is relatively reliable.
What you could do is get a "second opinion" by testing your package in the SCORM cloud (http://scorm.com/scorm-solved/scorm-cloud/). This solution gives you very detailed feedback about the communication between your package and the LMS. This might give you the arguments you need to start talking with the vendor of the LMS you are trying to integrate with.

Report · Feb 10, 2011

I've been giving this whole general LMS debugging issue some thought and I'm of the opinion that it would be a worthy excercise for Adobe to create their own AICC/SCORM debugging app (maybe an AIR app) that could be used to test Captivate output against SCORM standards.

Captivate gets too much flack for these supposed failures against the ancient ADL SCORM test suite and some LMSs that I strongly suspect are not all THAT SCORM compliant when push comes to shove.

So I'd really like to have some kind of SCORM debugging tool that ran on my desktop or from a web server that allowed me to see all (and I mean ALL) of the API interaction between a Captivate lesson and an LMS.

Maybe I'm dreaming, but this sounds like a good idea to me. I'm tired of all the difficulties we encounter trying to get elearning courses to work with an ever increasing bevvy of LMS vendors that all swear blind any issues must be from the authoring tools....even though these same authored SCORM packages work perfectly well in plenty of other LMSs.

Report · Feb 10, 2011

I'm working in Captivate 5 and having the same problem, though we didn't have it with CP4.

On the advice of the tech support guy with our LMS, I tested a project in SCORM Cloud.(www.scorm.com )

I got the same result - incomplete, with a parsing warning message of

Error parsing the metadata's typical learning time field ('::'): The time interval specified ('::') is not in a supported format.

This although the duration, time allowed, etc. are not enabled.

I also had to disable the pop-up blocker in IE before running it.

I'm going to try testing it with the times turned on and see if it makes a difference. If so, it's a bug in CP5.

Report · Feb 10, 2011

MarionJD,

we are experiencing the same thing. We remove the "typicallearningtime" tag from the manifest file, because it prevents the upload of the package in our LMS. For the rest, it does not seem to have an impact on anything else.

Report · Feb 10, 2011

First, let me say, WE HAVE A WORKING SOLUTION! Read below to see the solution.
Second, let me say, THANK YOU to RodWard and Jan for all of their help and suggestions!
Now, the solution:

I am publishing the courses to SCORM 2004 using the options shown in step #1 in my original post. Just as before, I am making the modification to the htm file (I would still like to know how to modify the master file wherever it is so I don’t have to make this modification after every time I publish.), zipping up the files and testing them in the ADL SCORM 2004 Test Suite (in Internet Explorer). Everything checks out properly (just as it did before). Now, when I upload to the LMS, I am testing the course using IE and the tracking works properly. Previously, I was using the Google Chrome browser and the course was not tracking at all. So, apparently, there is something in the htm file that Captivate generates that makes it browser specific.
So that’s the solution to this. I have informed the client to make sure that their students use IE and Flash Player 9 or higher to launch the course from the LMS.
Now, to address some of your comments:

"So I'd really like to have some kind of SCORM debugging tool that ran on my desktop or from a web server that allowed me to see all (and I mean ALL) of the API interaction between a Captivate lesson and an LMS." - RodWard

There is such a tool and the price is great: SCORM Watch by Platte Canyon. I've seen this tool in action and it really is a great asset for seeing all of the SCORM calls happening in real time. I've been to several of Platte Canyon's conferences when I was a major TookBook user. Towards the later years of their conferences, they became ToolBook/Flash conferences (all based on eLearning). Great company! I can't recommend them any higher.

Report · Mar 01, 2011

@ckenisell1 I was just looking back over some of these posts and noticed that I never did show you how to get your customised HTM SCORM template to be visible inside Captivate's Quiz Preferences drop down.

All you have to do is go to:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 5\Templates\Publish\SCORM\1_2 (for SCORM 1.2)

or

C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe Captivate 5\Templates\Publish\SCORM\2004 (for SCORM 2004)

Copy and rename the Custom HTM template from within the folder and give it a name of your choosing. Then make the modifications to this file that you want to be in effect every time you use it.

When you next open the Prefences > Quiz > Reporting dialog and select Enable Reporting > Standard > SCORM you'll be able to see your new template file in the Template drop down menu.

Report · Mar 01, 2011

Thanks Rod. This is helpful and will save some time.

Report · Feb 11, 2011

My problem is solved! (I think.)

Mine was with Captivate 5, and was caused by Adobe adding extra options in the Report Data preferences, then defaulting to their own ConnectPro.

All the tests I've run today, with almost any setting BUT ConnectPro, work.

My thanks to ckenisell1 - it was the screenshot you included in your original post that caught my eye and pointed me in the right direction.

They should all be so simple!

Report · Mar 01, 2011

Thanks to all for your help.