When you launch am AICC or SCORM course, you leave the LMS. You are in a separate web application (the course) with its own design patterns and operating requirements. If you are using a 3rd party authoring tool or content vendor, the user experience in the course is outside of scope of support of MaxIT. Our technology is infrastructure. A Course is technology that leverages the infrastructure, and a problem in course tracking for the great majority of the time is not a problem in AbilityLMS.
From time to time, the user experience in the course may not work as expected. Problems can vary to a freeze in the course, the course showing finished but the LMS showing in-progress, to the course never showing a finished status in both the user experience in the course and in the LMS. Sometimes a new browser release or a browser dropping support of older technology the course uses (like flash) causes a course to suddenly misbehave. The number of ways a course can fail are numerous and in turn can lead to misleading results in the LMS. Our logging is your friend.
An important concept to grasp is THE COURSE HAS RESPONSIBILITY TO ASK FOR AND TO SEND DATA TO THE LMS. On launch the LMS gives the course a URL or API to communicate through, but the course has the responsibility to communicate. The LMS cannot make the course communicate. .
To help support courseware behavior we have invented logging that sits between the course and the LMS. When the course requests information from the LMS, it is logged. When the course sends tracking data it is logged. ALL LOGGING OCCURS ***BEFORE*** THE LMS TRIES TO PROCESS THE COURSE DATA.
Our logging is the great equalizer in courseware support because it shows what the LMS received, and it allows you to reframe courseware support to prove the course is posting in YOUR ENVIRONMENT, not from a 3rd party LMS like SCORMCLOUD or something a 3rd party vendor will use.
If you are seeing AbilityLMS track in most cases and you are experience a problem audience, the problem domain is either a bug in the user experience in the course that has to be identified or you have a problem in the specific user environment.
In the use case of a bug in the course, our log can be helpful for courseware support as it shows the data the LMS received through all user launches. Some of the internal raw data may be unreadable to the LMS Admin, but it often can be helpful to courseware support to help isolate the bug.
If the use case is environmental, this can be a rabbit hole of time to sort out as you have numerous technology considerations like device limitations, browsers supported, problems in different versions of browsers, intentional browser restrictions as a result of corporate policy, proxy servers, application acceleration (caching), flash incompatibilities, trust vs non-trust and many, many other problems to sort out.
In either case, our log will show you what the LMS received and it allows you to engage your course or tool vendors to focus on:
- what the course is sending
- when it is sending expected data,
- what in the environment is not allowing the posting to go to the LMS.
Our log is your first line of defense to guide you (and our support team) that AbilityLMS is getting good data and complete data. Please refer to other KB articles in courseware troubleshooting.
To access the logs:
Go to People, and look up the person.
Select the person.
In most implementation the default tab is history to list training activity for the user. If the tab is not selected, please select it.
Look up the course in question and in the action column, click the 1st icon, usually a circle green-I icon (your implementation might use a different icon).
Click the History Log tab. This tab only shows for SCORM and AICC courses.
For SCORM click the SCORM API LOG file link.
For AICC click the only link that displays.
Scroll to the bottom to see the most recent course to LMS communication. Use the CTRL+F search feature in the browser to look for keywords like Passed Completed, Score.
Sometimes comparing the log of a user who completed the course to the log of a user who did not can be helpful.
If on clicking the link to view the log, it does not load, please log a support ticket as from time to time, security and permission settings can impact log availability in the user experience, but the logging is always occurring behind the scenes.