Issues with suspend data in SCORM courses
Some SCORM related issues might be caused by suspend data, such as the following:
Suspend data upper limit
It should be noted that the upper limit for suspend data is 64,000 characters. If this limit is exceeded, it can cause issues with SCORM courses, depending on the browser being used.
Altering an existing SCORM course causes data errors
A SCORM course holds data about a user's progression and when it loads, it validates this data against the imsmanifest.xml file. If the data does not match, an error will occur. For example, if you originally had 14 slides in a SCORM course and you remove 1 slide, the data will no longer match, as the expectation is, there are 14 slides in the SCORM course.
We do not advise overwriting SCORM courses within Fuse. Instead, we advise you to upload a new version of the SCORM course.
If you choose to overwrite a SCORM course, you can select the relevant option in Articulate Storyline and other WYSIWYG authoring tools, which ignores suspend data. However, before doing so, please ensure that assigned users are completed or not started; there should be no users currently in progress (incomplete) - this ensures there are no issues when the SCORM file is overwritten. Any users currently in progress when the SCORM file is overwritten must restart the SCORM course from the beginning and may encounter issues when trying to launch the course (the user is presented with a blank screen).
If you choose to overwrite a SCORM course, any previous records for users that have already completed the SCORM course will remain, as the Fuse content ID of the SCORM course stays the same.
If you have overwritten a SCORM file and encountered issues with the suspend data, we recommended uploading a brand new version of that SCORM course to Fuse, for users to take from scratch, or contact Fuse Customer Support.
Users cannot progress or complete a SCORM course
Suspend_data is used to store temporary information about a SCORM course, such as:
How much progress a user has made
Any assessment/quiz results
If a user has completed the SCORM course
For more experienced developers, suspend_data can be used to store more granular information about the status of a SCORM course.
Fuse supports SCORM 1.2, which allows up to 4,096 characters in the suspend_data variable. If the course tries to write more than this, issues related to the loading or completion of SCORM courses can occur. As this is standard when using SCORM 1.2, there is nothing that Fuse can do to resolve this.
To resolve these issues:
If you have developed the SCORM course internally then changes can be made in-house. We strongly advise that you break larger SCORM courses into smaller chunks or disable the resume functionality.
If the SCORM course comes from an external supplier, we recommend contacting them, as the SCORM course is not designed to work with SCORM 1.2 and the supplier must make the necessary changes for you.