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Troubleshoot eLearning course issues
Troubleshoot eLearning course issues

Learn to troubleshoot common issues affecting eLearning courses (for example, SCORM)

Chris Ramlow avatar
Written by Chris Ramlow
Updated over a week ago

Problem

You have one or more of these problems and you are trying to figure out how to solve them:

  • You can't import your eLearning course.

  • You can't launch your eLearning course.

  • Your eLearning course launches, but it does not look good.

  • Your eLearning course does not (reliably) report course completions.

Solution

There might be a range of issues affecting your course, so we'll explore each one.

Import Issues

You keep on running into errors when attempting to import (upload) a course to our platform.

  • Your course may use unsupported or mismatched standards (e.g. exported as SCORM 1.2 but reports itself as SCORM 2004). Potential solutions:

    • Re-publish your course from your authoring tool and upload it again. You may want to try a different eLearning standard.

    • Validate that your course uses the correct API wrapper

      • This requires looking at the manifest file inside the ZIP package.

      • Make sure you don't mix and match different standards - i.e. there can only be one manifest file: imsmanifest.xml (SCORM), tincan.xml (xAPI), cmi5.xml (cmi5).

    • Check that the standard your course uses is supported by PlusPlus: SCORM 1.2, SCORM 2004, AICC 4.0, cmi5 (recommended), and xAPI.

  • Your course may be incorrectly packaged. Potential solutions:

    • Make sure your course ZIP file contains the course manifest (e.g. imsmanifest.xml) at the top (root) of the ZIP file, not in a folder.

    • Repackage your course by zipping the files in the root of the course folder, but not the folder itself.

    • Make sure you are using the plain-old ZIP archive format - not 7ZIP, TAR, GZ, BZ2 or any other compression/archive format/standard.

Launch Issues

You are able to upload the course, but it won't (properly) launch.

  • Your browser may have an ad/popup blocker that prevents your course from launching. Potential solution:

    • Go to your course's Advanced Settings and change Player Launch Type and Player SCO Launch Type to Display the player or SCO in a child frameset.

    • Disable the ad/popup blocker (or other similar plugins) in your browser.

  • Your course may not launch properly in a mobile browser. Potential solutions:

    • Try a desktop browser.

    • Check your mobile browser's popup settings (including ad blockers).

    • Check your mobile browser's JavaScript settings (including ad blockers and battery savers), since your course requires JavaScript to run.

    • Switch to launch in a frameset (see above).

  • Your course attempts to load content from a CDN or another website, and runs into Cross Domain issues: won't launch, or launches without media, or won't initialize or send tracking data. Potential solutions:

    • Package all content within the course and let our eLearning provider take care of serving the course content.

    • Avoid loading other sites (e.g. in an <iframe/>) inside of your course.

    • Look in your browser's Developer Tools for instances of DOMException: Blocked a frame with origin "https://... " from accessing a cross-origin frame (or similar) messages.

Tracking Issues

Your learners complain that their course progress and/or completions are not accurately tracked.

  • Your course is not properly sending the completion information. Possible solutions:

    • Ensure there is an Exit button that submits the completion info before the user leaves your course.

    • If you don't have an Exit button, go to your course's Advanced Settings and set Player Show Nav Bar to Enabled, which will show the user the Exit button.

    • Switch to launch in a frameset (see above). Sometimes the course tracking info does not work across popups.

    • Validate that it's not a browser issue. Try another browser, such as the latest version of Firefox.

    • Don't use Flash inside your courses, as it's been deprecated.

    • Debug your course (see below).

  • Your course does not remember the learner's progress in the course, so it always restarts from the beginning. Possible solutions:

    • In your course authoring tool, add more course bookmarks, and re-publish/re-upload your course.

    • Switch to launch in a frameset (see above). The user might have closed the parent window, which would leave the popup window unable to communicate back.

If none of the above solutions work, we recommend you debug your eLearning course issues.

Go deeper

Your eLearning course starts long before you import it into PlusPlus. It's important to ensure that the course is authored and packaged properly, and that it follows all of the established eLearning best practices, especially around runtime reporting.

See also

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