cmi.interactions.n.description length

[andreyaraminta]

Hi Articulate team,


What's the maximum length scorm 2004 3rd edition standard for cmi.interactions.n.description element?

Isn't it 250 characters length?

It seems like articulate allow more than 250 characters for cmi.interactions.n.description element.

based on -the Insights-: SCORM 2.1 and SCORM 2004 standards


I got index out of range error while running a quiz in my LMS system. It happened when the quiz question is longer than 250 characters.

And after uploading the quiz to testtrack website, it seems like the quiz question are stored in the cmi.interactions.n.descriptions element.

Is there suppose to be a limit how many characters you can put for the quiz question?



regards

andreyaraminta

[dmozealous]

Hi Andrey,

Yeah, the limit for the maximum length of a question is 250 characters, and I know we don't limit the number of characters in a quiz question to 250 characters in the authoring tool, because we don't want to limit the length of a question.

I can see if we can look into limiting how many characters we send in cmi.interactions.n.description, but I don't know when we will be able to get that change in. To be honest, this is the first I have heard of an LMS having an issue with more than 250 characters.

There are a couple of things that can be done on on authoring side to correct this issue if a change can't be made to the LMS to support more than 250 characters:

1. Make sure questions are less than 250 characters in Quizmaker
2. If you need longer questions, in slide view add a new text box and add more text as needed. We will only send question text that resides in the Question text box.
3. Turn off interaction reporting. This will cause only the score and status to be reported. You can do this by doing the following:

- Publish to LMS output
- Open the \lms subfolder
- Open the Configuration.js file in notepad
- Find this line:
var DO_NOT_REPORT_INTERACTIONS = false;
- Change it to:
var DO_NOT_REPORT_INTERACTIONS = true;
- Save the file


Any one of those options should resolve the issue on the authoring side.

Hope this helps.

[andreyaraminta]

Originally Posted by dmozealous

Hi Andrey,

Yeah, the limit for the maximum length of a question is 250 characters, and I know we don't limit the number of characters in a quiz question to 250 characters in the authoring tool, because we don't want to limit the length of a question.

I can see if we can look into limiting how many characters we send in cmi.interactions.n.description, but I don't know when we will be able to get that change in. To be honest, this is the first I have heard of an LMS having an issue with more than 250 characters.

There are a couple of things that can be done on on authoring side to correct this issue if a change can't be made to the LMS to support more than 250 characters:

1. Make sure questions are less than 250 characters in Quizmaker
2. If you need longer questions, in slide view add a new text box and add more text as needed. We will only send question text that resides in the Question text box.
3. Turn off interaction reporting. This will cause only the score and status to be reported. You can do this by doing the following:

- Publish to LMS output
- Open the \lms subfolder
- Open the Configuration.js file in notepad
- Find this line:
var DO_NOT_REPORT_INTERACTIONS = false;
- Change it to:
var DO_NOT_REPORT_INTERACTIONS = true;
- Save the file


Any one of those options should resolve the issue on the authoring side.

Hope this helps.

Hi Dave,

Thanks for the answer. I will go with option 1. Make sure the question don't go longer than 250 characters.

I can change the SLK code to support more than 250 characters but it just doesn't feel right because the SCORM standard suppose to be 250 character than I will just leave it like that.

Is there any other elements i need to be aware off that Articulate doesn't follow the SCORM standard?

Thanks

Andreyaraminta

[dmozealous]

Hi Andrey,

There are a couple of places that I can think of off my head where a user can get into a situation where the output would violate the SCORM standard.

1. Really long quizzes and the suspend_data. If you have a really long quiz we will eventually go over the SCORM limit on the amount of data that can be sent for suspend_data. The SCORM 2004 limit is pretty robust, so the quiz will have to be pretty big, but it varies by the question type what the limit would be.

2. Long learner_responses to Essay questions. The SCORM limit I believe is 4000 characters, and if a learner answers an Essay question with more than 4000 characters the learner_response will exceed that limit. We do have an option in the Quizmaker authoring tool to limit the number of Characters in a response though, so you can handle this on the authoring tool side.

These are the only places I can think of at the moment where a user can get in a situation where we would violate the SCORM standard.

[andreyaraminta]

Originally Posted by dmozealous

Hi Andrey,

There are a couple of places that I can think of off my head where a user can get into a situation where the output would violate the SCORM standard.

1. Really long quizzes and the suspend_data. If you have a really long quiz we will eventually go over the SCORM limit on the amount of data that can be sent for suspend_data. The SCORM 2004 limit is pretty robust, so the quiz will have to be pretty big, but it varies by the question type what the limit would be.

2. Long learner_responses to Essay questions. The SCORM limit I believe is 4000 characters, and if a learner answers an Essay question with more than 4000 characters the learner_response will exceed that limit. We do have an option in the Quizmaker authoring tool to limit the number of Characters in a response though, so you can handle this on the authoring tool side.

These are the only places I can think of at the moment where a user can get in a situation where we would violate the SCORM standard.

Thanks Dave for the information.

[Konvert]

Hi Andrey,

We are expreriencing the same problem, the same problem.
Can you explain here what you've done to get to a solution?