How to publish Captivate to retain highest score

[averilt87056228]

We are working with a lesser known Spanish LMS provider using Scorm 1.2. We need to find a way to let a Captivate file take care of the logic to only ever let a score improve. The LMS just takes delivery of the quiz score but makes no further decisions on what to do with this score. We have found an easy variable change in Articulate Storyline that allows us to only ever display the highest score, ensuring that students don't lose a completed status if they have tried another time.

Is there anything in Captivate that will allow us to do this. I have searched the web and this forum and can only find entries at least 4 years old. Has anything changed? Would you expect the LMS to take care of this?

Our LMS offers one option that should mean that a 'Completed' lesson status will no longer be updated. Unfortunately this doesn't work with Captivate as I found that my status still gets reset back to incomplete if I go back in my module with the back arrow or the rewind button ( I am using scored interactions throughout the module).

The conclusion to all my testing was that for a a Scorm module to work the way we need it to, it has to include its own logic to only let scores improve.

The response to that from the LMS supplier was this:

This has to be always like this. All materials should be 100% SCORM compliance and include all logics internally so the LMS only needs to check the comparative between the Raw Score and the Mastery Score. Anything else, needs to come from the material.

I know Scorm isn't quite such a black and white standard as they make it out to be, but is there anything you can suggest to help us resolve this for Captivate files?

I'd be really grateful for any advice.

Thank you, ilka

[RodWard]

Yes we would normally expect the LMS to be taking care of this. There is no default Quiz setting in Captivate to achieve this, and to my knowledge none of the Captivate system variables are going to be showing you the learner's previous top score retrieved from the LMS database so that you could do some tricky Advanced Actions to limit navigation to the Quiz Results slide and thereby prevent submission of the score to the LSM. 

It's not that doing something like this isn't TECHNICALLY possible using custom computer code, because almost anything is nowadays.  It's just that (to my knowledge) Captivate doesn't have an option to do this by default.  But plenty of LMSs DO have this kind of capability (and much more).

I am interested in your statement that you have been able to achieve this using a variable in Articulate Storyline.  Perhaps if you can share how you did that, we can better suggest a way to do it with Captivate.

I disagree with their statement that "the LMS only needs to check the comparative between the Raw Score and the Mastery Score."  If they are saying that an LMS does nothing more than this, that's absolute rubbish.  A very basic LMS with next to NO functionality would certainly be capable of doing that much, otherwise it would never be able to give you any kind of reporting.  But I assure you that most LMSs are capable of doing a LOT more with the quiz data than just comparing Raw Score (what the learner got) with the Mastery Score (what they needed to get to achieve a pass).  If this is ALL your LMS does, then I hope it's either free or you are not paying much at all for its services.  I suspect your LMS people are just saying this to avoid having to build more smarts into their product.

Another wrinkle is that TECHNICALLY (again) according to the SCORM standard, a SCO module is not supposed to be looking anywhere outside itself for anything in order to function.  What you suggest above would actually break that standard.  The LMS is supposed to set up a communication connection (called an API) with the course content and 'listen' to the SCORM calls emanating from the content, taking care of storing that data for reporting purposes.

Most people don't take the above as gospel nowadays and there are plenty of courses that DO use things like Offline Storage or Local Storage to achieve greater functionality.  But if your LMS people are willing to insist that your content has to be 100% SCORM Compliant, then it could never do what you want or what they say it should.

[averilt87056228]

Thank you for replying so quickly and so comprehensively. This all makes sense. I can understand the logic that there is no setting for this within Captivate as it seems obvious to ask the LMS to make use of all the data it receives.

In Storyline you are able to change a variable in the Configuration.js file after you have published the course. It's a simple change from false to true (by default it is set to false):

var SCORE_CAN_ONLY_IMPROVE = true;

//set this to true to ensure that on subsequent attempts, a learner's score can only go up

I assume this calls out to the LMS to get the last recorded score and then compares it.

We'll get back to the LMS provider and try to make our case again.

Thank you

[RodWard]

OK.  I think I too may have heard about this once when I was doing a project for a client in Storyline.

But what you're doing here is not being done through the Storyline interface.  It's making a change to the JS code templates.

This might also be possible to do for someone with enough knowledge of the JS code that Captivate publishes.  I'm not that great on JS code, but there are a couple of people that usually chime in on this list that are gurus.

Hopefully one of them will be able to help.