SCORM Assignment Submissions not Registering Sporadically

[JosephMcCartney]

Hello. I am the LMS Administrator for a government institution that uses a modified version of the open source Canvas. I know this falls outside of the scope of this forum, but I have tried for over a year to get my organization to do anything about it and at this point I would appreciate any kind of insight.

We have a large amount of lessons hosted in Canvas as SCORM packages that are setup to provide the completion status to students upon submission of the assignment. The lessons are all setup like PowerPoint slides and students considered to have completed the lessons upon reaching the final slide. This works most of the time; however, the lessons will occasionally not provide credit to students.

The cases in which students do not receive completion for lessons are accompanied with an error message thrown by the internet browser they are using (see attached image). The error indicates that the SCORM package was unable to communicate with Canvas. Once this occurs for a student in a particular lesson, they are unable to receive completion for the lesson by any means. Additionally, the error message never again appears. This seems to indicate that the SCORM packages are only ever attempting to communicate with Canvas once and, if they fail, will never attempt to transmit completion again.

My question is this: does anyone have any idea what the cause of this might be or have any information that would prove useful to the team responsible for managing our instance of Canvas in resolving this issue?

Thank you for your time.

[chriscas · Accepted solution]

Hi @JosephMcCartney,

I don't really have a solution for you, but I wanted to chime in and say we experience this sort of sporadic grade passback issue with multiple different vendors from time to time.  As you say, 99% of the time, things work fine, but occasionally, without changing any settings or anything, we have random failures.  We can never track them down to a specific time point, user, browser, or anything, just that the passback randomly failed.  I think it's really on the vendor to build in retry mechanisms to their systems, as internet communication failures or server issues do happen from time to time.  I don't know whether that would be on Instructure for SCORM or who actually maintains SCORM because it's somewhat like an external tool, but not exactly the same.

Unfortunately, running a version open-source Canvas also limits your support options for this.  I'm afraid I don't have any great suggestions unless your organization is willing to purchase/license an Instructure-hosted Canvas instance with a level of support attached.  I know that may not be feasible, but I at least wanted to mention the possibility.

-Chris