Best practice forum (Archived)

SCORM grades getting lost

I'm not sure if I'm asking for help here or just posting some useful findings, but anyway would be interested to hear if anyone has similar problems/results.

In Totara 1.1 we've had a long-standing issue with SCORM grades sometimes not being recorded. Sometimes it works and sometimes not; our testing has been a bit sporadic and, frankly, despondent :-( But recently we found that if two users are doing the same scorm at the same time then only one of them gets recorded. We've tried this on a couple of courses now and got some consistent results (or lack of results).

Usually all our courses have "Student skip content structure page" set to "always" but today we happened upon a course where this was set as "never" and found the problem gone; since replicated in other courses and wider testing scheduled. Feels like a breakthrough of some sort.

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that particular setting is a lot more stable in Moodle 2.4 and higher than it was in Moodle 1.9 - also another thing to check would be the auto-update frequency setting - have you got that set to "every time it's used" - is your SCORM zip stored outside Moodle and do you frequently update your SCORM package? - if not - make sure that's set to never as it can cause problems (especially in Moodle 1.9) - it operates slightly better in Moodle 2

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Thanks for the reply, Dan.

Are you saying here that the Auto-update frequency should be set to "never" even when it's a locally hosted scorm (so this setting shouldn't matter)?

We've done some more testing on several platforms and found there is almost always a problem with Moodle 1.9 / Totara 1.1 (but OK in 2.4) and my theory about the content structure page didn't hold up.

But I seem to have skimmed over your reply until looking now. That auto-update setting is one of the few things we haven't tried yet. Must give it a go...

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Eureka!

We've set auto-update frequency to "never" even though it should make no diference. That seems to have done it at last.

Thanks again.

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when auto-update is set it will check the scorm zip and rebuild the data in Moodle - this unfortunately changes the ids of the scos in the table. In Moodle 2 we disable that setting in places when it doesn't make sense so we prevent this from happening a lot more.

The main problem is that Moodle relies on the order of the scos listed in the database table - so if an updated SCORM package contains new scos or removes scos it needs to re-create the entries in the table - the code doesn't check to see if this is needed, it just does it every time an update is require deleting the old scos and recreating them again with new ids.

I would like to rewrite the code at some point so that we don't need to do this anymore and any new scos can just be inserted and the order updated but this isn't a small bit of work and no-one has offered to fund my time to improve it.

little bit more info on this here: MDL-34746

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