Regardless of whether you deploy your Articulate Presenter courses in an LMS, you can benefit from a feature built-in to LMSes: Resume course. But what do you do with the setting if your course is not in an LMS?

Resuming When Not in a Learning Management System (LMS)

In the Articulate Presenter Player Template Builder, go to the Navigation section, and make sure Prompt to resume on presentation restart is checked in the player template you’re using.

When enabled, this option will set a Flash cookie on the user’s machine, typically in a location similar to the below:

C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash
Player\#SharedObjects

(If a course is viewed by multiple users on the same machine — each with a unique machine login — a unique Flash cookie will be set for each user. So if users share a machine and the computer login, the resume will be the same for everyone.)

When a user views a course, exits it, then later launches the course again, she’ll be prompted whether she wants to resume where she left off (assuming the Flash cookies are still intact on her local machine):

(Test this out yourself by viewing this Articulate Online Overview — hosted on a regular Web server, not in an LMS — closing the window, then clicking the link again.)

To Resume or Not to Resume in an LMS?

But what if your course does reside in an LMS? Should you leave this option checked?

It really depends on your user base and whether you’re confident everyone has a unique computer or will be using shared machines, but in most cases, the answer is no — you should uncheck the resume option.

Thanks to the magic of SCORM or AICC and the suspend_data call, your course will already be communicating with the LMS, and the LMS will tell the course where to pick up, making use of the same functionality as described above.

The primary difference, however, is that the suspend_data details are stored on the server and associated with each individual user account — in your LMS — and not on your computer in the Flash cookie.

So the bottom line is that if you’re deploying your courses via LMS (or Articulate Online), let your LMS do the resume work, and disable that option in Presenter before you publish. And if your courses are in an LMS, they should always resume where your users left off; it’s not possible to disable resume in an LMS.

(You can discuss the prompt to resume feature and LMS bookmarking more in our forums — or comment here, of course.)