Suspend Data without LMS - Articulate Storyline

Question

I work for a small company that is using a custom built web system using ASP.NET that hosts a number of learning tools, including articulate storyline courses.

We have an SQL database that stores the learner variables from the storyline courses, which works well. However this only works if a user completes the course in one go. If the user logs out of their account half way through their course and uses another device to log back in, they would lose their progress.

There is a Suspend Data function that we would like to make use of, I have seen this work with LMS's, but we want to keep our system as it is. As ours isn't an off the shelf LMS and we don't have a system that complies to SCORM, our developer is struggling to find out how we can capture the users Suspend Data that gets fired on every slide. We want to capture this so that when a user logs back into their account we can resume them to the point where they left off if they log out.

Has anyone in the past used Suspend Data without an LMS? Any advice would be greatly received.

Thanks,

Jack

Answer 1

The SCORM Run Time Environment (RTE) is implemented using a heavily specified JavaScript object as the API. Storyline during launch will do a search based on a pre-defined algorithm for finding this object in the global namespace with a specific name (depending on the version of SCORM). The object stored in that namespace would only need to implement a tiny subset of the SCORM RTE API to receive the suspend data. For instance in SCORM 1.2 that object would need to have an LMSSetValue method that takes an element name, in this case cmi.suspend_data and the value (a string) and stores that value for future use. On the flip side, it would need to implement LMSGetValue such that when the element name, cmi.suspend_data , is requested the previously set value can be provided in return. How that data is stored to the server between sessions, etc. is implementation specific.

Naturally a course implemented against the SCORM specification will usually expect other functionality to exist in that API and your mileage may vary on how courses react to finding the object but not having the full implementation available.

There are also a number of ways to implement SCORM into a specific part of the system while letting someone else handle the SCORM implementation, SCORM Cloud is an example of this with pay per use pricing.