Best practice forum (Archived)

SCORM Launch method resetting?

We have a strange phenomena which I wish to chek if others have encountered as well. We have a Totara 1.1.2 website for a client.

There are courses with SCORM e-learning modules in them. In the module settings we have set the Display Package field to Launch directly from course.

It saves OK so when you return immediately to the module settings you see it in the same value. Module launches ok in its own window.

However we get repeated cases from users that modules appear to be launching in current window (thus very small and unusable). When we get back to that course we see that settings have indeed changed to display in "Current window" and we need to set them back to "Launch directly..." for it to work OK again.

The only admin is me so no one else was able to change setting. At first I thought I missed a setting or two, but this keeps hapening randomly and repeatedly.

Have anyone seen something like this? How can we verify if it's a bug?

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Hi Amir,

That does sound very strange, and we've been upable to reproduce it here. Can you let me know which OS and database you are using, and also see if there's anything relevant in your error logs.

If you are able to narrow down the circumstances that cause it that would be helpful. Finally perhaps you could look in your site logs and see if there's anything scorm related that would explain it.

Simon

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Hi Amir - I've just tested this on Postgres, and can't reproduce your problem.

Is there any form of caching that you are using?

What database are you on?

and -

Are you able to switch on developer debug mode and check the logs for messages especially at the point that you save the directview setting?

Cheers,

Piers Harding.

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Hi Amir,

we have just encountered the same problem you were talking about. Could you find any solution for this?

Our workaround right now is to set Display package field to "New window" and set width and height to 1024x768.

Denise

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Hi Denise,

Thanks for sharing the info...I was starting to think it was my imagination...

The workaround may pose a problem if there are users with different screen resolutions - either smaller or larger.

Can anyone on the Totara team trace the origin of this problem and confirm it is a bug?

Thanks,

Amir

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Hi Amir

Dan Marsden may know more about this - it looks like he is trying to develop a more reliable SCORM player http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=152895 as the existing one does have issues with height and width settings not working consistently.

Craig

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yeah - the SCORM player in Moodle 2 is quite different in a range of ways to SCORM in 1.9 and should be a lot more reliable.

I'm also not completey clear that Denise and Amir are having the same issue - Denise can you explain the issue you are seeing? - is it a display issue or is there a problem with settings mysteriously reverting as described by Amir?

Also, Denise - which version of Totara are you seeing this issue with?

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I'm experiencing exactly the same issue Amir described above. The settings misteriously changed from "Launch directly.." to "Current window".

Totara Version was 1.1.14 (Build 20120403.0).

Denise

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I've taken another look into this, and although I'm still not able to reproduce it I have found a possible cause in mod/scorm/lib.php:

// no directview if popup
if ($scorm->popup == 2) {
    $scorm->directview = 1;
    $scorm->popup = 0;
}
else {
    $scorm->directview = 0;
}

This seems to incorrectly set popup to "new window" when directview is being used. Removing the $scorm->popup = 0; line may fix the problem - although I can't say for sure without being able to reproduce it.

I'll include this change in the next 1.1 release - let me know if the problem is still occurring after that!

Simon

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Hi,

This change was included in the release of version 1.1.19 yesterday (5th Sept 2012). Hopefully this will fix your scorm issues, if not let us know.

Cheers
David

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