LMS will not refresh after course is closed

Report · Jan 09, 2014

Hello,

I am hoping someone can give me insight into what might be causeing this problem.

I have a number of courses uploaded to both a staging site and a live site. We recently made a few changes to a course which I thought were quite minor and I uploaded the new scorm files to the LMS staging site for testing.

The changes were:

the continue button on the Quiz Review slide has always had the text "exit" instead of "continue" but I recently changed the colour from grey to red.
the message that a user received when they pass the quiz is different

The old courses worked on both sites as follows:

If a course was started and a user quite part way through the course the LMS would say resume course when the user logged back in.

If the course was failed then the user would see retake on the LMS when they logged back in and could then retake the course.

If the user passed the course, it was moved from an "In Progress" area on the LMS to a "Completed" area on the LMS automatically.

Since I made the relatively minor changes to the courses, they will no longer move unless you choose to refresh the page. All courses that have not been updated still work as they should which is what leads me to believe it is not a LMS issue but rather the scorm file issue.

I am using Captivate 7 and have recently updated all my Adobe products so I should have the most recent version of the software. I am wondering if something has changed with how Captivate creates Scorm files?

Also under Reporting/advanced LMS for the courses I have selected Send data on every slide and Set exit to normal after completion (these have always been the settings)

Scorm files are SCORM 2004

Any input would be very much appreciated.

Report · Jan 09, 2014

You could be running into a caching error. Your users may not be using the very latest version of your course files.

Try getting one of the users that are partway through a module to to delete their browser cache and see if that resolves the issues. If it does, any modules users have completed will still be registered in the LMS as such, but any modules they're part way through may need to be done again from scratch.

A great deal of the SCORM code has changed recently. Especially during the change from Cp 5.5 to 6.0 when the new Rustici drivers were introduced. If you created these courses with Cp7, then most of that code should be unchanged even when you update with a patch. But this doesn't get you around the caching issue I mention above.

Report · Jan 10, 2014

Hi Rod,

I could be wrong but I don't think that is the issue.

The updated courses are only on the staging site as we do not transfered them until they are tested. Only those courses that have been recently updated are not working properly but I know that the correct course is being loaded as the button on the Quiz Review is now red. Yesterday I did a test on the live site and uploaded one of the updated courses to see if the problem persisted on the live site. Same problem was on the live site. When I removed this undated course and reverted back to the original the problem went away. It seems it is definitely an issue with the newly updated course.

The courses were oringinaly created using Captivate 6 but then saved in Cativate 7 months ago as I have been using it since if first came out. The original files that were working were created in Captivate 7.

Thanks

Report · Mar 04, 2014

I'm having the exact same issue using Cornerstone LMS and Captivate 7. Doesn't matter what I do... exit will not automatically refresh the LMS browser and we have to do that manually (which is very confusing for our learners). Is there something in the code of Captivate 7 that is not automatically refreshing the launch page (LMS)? ANYONE?

Report · Mar 04, 2014

Do you have the cmi.exit value set in your advanced actions anywhere? In my advanced actions I had:

cmi.exit set to 1

jump to slide 1

execute javascript

This worked for the longest time but there was an update to Captivate (or at least something seemed to change) and so I removed the cmi.exit set to 1 and it works now.

Hope this helps.

Report · Mar 04, 2014

No I do not have any advanced actions anywhere.

Report · Mar 04, 2014

To isolate the issue, have you tried uploading your Cp 6 and Cp 7 course to scormCloud.com? It's free to test/try them out and they have log files that show the communication between the LMS and the SCO. I would load the Cp 6 course and the Cp 7 course and compare the logs to see what might be different. This should give you some insight as to what may be happening inside your LMS and narrow the scope of the issue.

There's also the live debugging feature that's part of the Captivate file. If you hit SHIFT and QUESTION MARK three times while the focus is on the html page (not the swf), then you should get a debugging window to pop up and show you the live communication between the LMS and the SCO. The live debugging sometimes works, and sometimes not. I've had mixed results with it, but it's great when it does.

Jim Leichliter

Report · Mar 04, 2014

This course was created with Cp7. We don't have this particular one in Cp6. If I open a Cp7 in Cp6 and republish.... will that work?

I've also tried it on scormcloud.com and it works as it should. Refreshes correctly and automatically. Thanks for the question mark suggestion... didn't know about that one.

I'm thinking that it may be that Cornerstone (CSOD - our LMS) is not digesting some of the settings we're using in the Cp7 published files... but not sure about which setting orwould affect the refreshing of this page. Anyone know?

Report · Mar 04, 2014

What does the LMS vendor, Cornerstone, have to say about the issue? I think they would be concerned since a lot of content hosted on their site would be generated from Captivate... they may want to tackle the issue for their sake as well. Have they provided any insight?

Report · Mar 05, 2014

Did you completely re-import your course as a new course or did you just replace the files without doing an re-import?

There really aren't any differences between the scormdriver.js files between CP6 and CP7,

The SCORM_utilities.js file is very different.

Clearing your cache completely and making sure your browser is checking for a newer version of a file are extremely important! Manually go into the internet cache and delete the files.

If refreshing fixes your problem, it is more than likely a caching issue. SInce the js files (and probably most of your files) have the same name and on the same domain, they are probably not actually getting refreshed. Servers/folders can be set with expirations for file types, If the expiration is long (monthly, yearly) the browser will look in the cache first before pulling a file down form the server.

Report · Mar 05, 2014

We haven't tried this approach. We've been replacing files without a complete re-import. We'll try that next and report what happens.

And we will contact Cornerstone if they know anything about this from their other customers.

Thanks!

Report · Mar 05, 2014

I really don't think sliding the updated files without doing an import would actually matter. All the LMS really cares about is the launch page. The resources aren't really used. Just the index.htm.

I think it's going to come down to some kind of caching issue as Rod Ward said.

What browser are you using?

Report · Mar 05, 2014

Thanks TLCMediaDesign. We're using IE Version 8.

Report · Mar 05, 2014

Check in Internet Options, on the General Tab; under Browsing History, click the Settings button and make sure the "Every time I visit the webpage" radio button is selected... And try your course again.

Report · Mar 06, 2014

Tested it on two different computers and it worked. So you're right! It probably is a caching issue or something odd going on on that particular computer where we were testing it from.

We'll keep testing but looks like that's what happened.

Thanks all!