Adapt Learning Community: User progress tracking in course published from Authoring Tool

This is a very basic question that I apologize for in advance. I've created a course in the Authoring Tool, published it using the "Publish" feature, and I'm testing it out in my employer's LMS (Desire2Learn). The content works great, but the LMS doesn't appear to be tracking user progress. The completion tracking within the course itself is reset each time a user closes and reopens the course, and there don't appear to be any SCORM interactions associated with the course in the LMS's SCORM report.

These instructions explain how to turn on SCORM tracking when coding courses by hand, but I'm not sure how to turn on tracking when generating a course from the Authoring Tool (I was hoping it would be turned on by default).

I'm very new to SCORM, so I'm not sure what I should be expecting with a successful Adapt/LMS integration. There's little direct assessment in my course, but I was hoping to be able to see which components users have completed, or, at the very least, the overall completion percentage. Any help with this would be terrific.

Thanks,

Cory

Hi Cory,

Questions like this are really useful for us in identifying areas we need to improve, so don't be afraid to flag things that aren't clear to you; we want to make the authoring tool as easy to pick up and use as possible.

To answer your question:

Go to 'Manage extensions'
Click the 'Add' button next to Spoor
Click the 'Back to menu' button in the top left of the screen
Go into 'Configuration settings'
Under 'Extensions', you'll find a Spoor entry, which you can click to expand the spoor-relevant settings

This isn't the most intuitive workflow, so any advice you have/suggestions for improvement would be greatly appreciated. We're currently looking into including some kind of configuration instructions in the 'manage extensions' or 'Plugin Management' sections.

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Thanks for the help, Tom. Spoor is added and enabled for the course in the Authoring Tool, as is Assessment (enabled for at least some of the articles within it). Monitoring feedback from the browser console, I discovered that some of the issues I was experiencing seem to stem from the fact that I had published my course from a fairly old installation of the Authoring Tool. When using this course in the LMS, the console throws the following error:

"This course is missing a latestTrackingID.

Please run the grunt process prior to deploying this module on LMS.

Scorm tracking will not work correctly until this is done."

When I upload a course published from a more recent installation of the Authoring Tool, this error doesn't occur, and user progress is saved within Adapt. As I navigate the course, I can see in the console that Spoor is also tracking completion of individual components and assessments in the "completion" and "_isAssessmentPassed" fields.

However, the LMS's SCORM report is no more informative than before: it still just says that users who have viewed the content are "Incomplete". I get no information about which individual components or assessments exist in the object, or which have been completed for a given user (even though this information appears to be being tracked). Is this a limitation with my LMS (Desire2Learn)? Is it normal that Complete/Incomplete are the only two states I can view through the LMS in tracking user progress? (Again, my hope was to be able to see which components have been completed and/or percentage of user progress through the course)

Thanks again for your help,

Cory

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My apologies for the excessive posting. I did basically end up figuring out the answer to my own question. Completion percentage is apparently not generally tracked in SCORM 1.2 (correct?), so there's nothing wrong with my course setup or unusual about my LMS's SCORM reporting system. I just had unrealistic expectations. While I can use the browser console to visually count the number of 1's for component completion as I personally progress through my own course, that won't be possible for me to do for students in my class, right? In any case, it's not a good solution for non-technical instructors using our Adapt content to teach. Since purely completion-based assessment/progress tracking doesn't look like it's feasible, I guess I should simply build assessments into the course in order to report a grade to the LMS. Now that I've set "_shouldSubmitScore" to "true", this solution is working. Thanks everyone for your patience!

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Speaking from a SCORM point of view, the other thing you could do to track students' progress through the course more finely is to use 'cmi.objectives'.

Though not supported by all LMSes, these allow the course designer to create pre-defined objectives in the content which can then be completed according to whatever logic you need - it could be a simple as 'user has view all component on the first page' to 'user has answered three or more questions correctly and viewed at least one video'.

These are not supported out-of-the-box in Adapt (due to the highly custom nature and low LMS support) but it certainly is possible to add them in with (quite a bit of) custom coding.

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