Not to toot my own horn, but I’m a bit of a big gaming nerd. At DevLearn 2025, not only was I accepted to present with Chris Tompkins, but I was able to strut my nerdiness for both gaming and SCORM lost completions during the session.
Our good friends at dominKnow heard about the talk and thought it’d be a great fit to share with their audience. They recently asked us to join them for a webinar to share our top tips. And boy, did we have a lot of chatting and engagement! We had so many great questions that I wanted to take a minute to answer them in a way anyone can read.
General eLearning standards questions
We have about 3% of users who take our courses and complete them, but the LMS doesn’t record it. We’ve tried just about everything to adjust our courses. Could this be a SCORM issue?
In the old days, a 3% lost completion rate may have been OK, but today, 3% of your learner population could be a very large number that can overwhelm your support team with tickets. The good news is there are tips and tricks you can use to bring that number down to a tolerable level. Download our free SCORM lost completions eBook that shares all of our best practices to minimize this common concern.
What are the big differences between SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004? When do you use one over the other?
At Rustici, we’re all big proponents of choosing the best standard for your content and goals. If reliably recording completions is your biggest focus and concern, then SCORM 1.2 is a great fit for that and most LMSs will support it. If completions aren’t enough and you need to record more interactions data, that’s when you may want to publish in SCORM 2004 3rd or 4th Edition or cmi5. Bookmark this handy chart comparing SCORM 1.2 and SCORM 2004 for more.
One SCORM version isn’t inherently better than the other. Think of them more as different tools for the job to be done and choose the one that best fits your project.
Is bookmarking done in the creation of the course, and how do you find that?
Great question. As Paul stated in the webinar, normally authoring tools turn bookmarking on by default. Some tools have the option to turn it off, but by default you should see the courses bookmark.
Now, the questions are how do you find the bookmark and know if it is happening. This can be difficult without a third party tool or access to the authoring tool. You can test in SCORM Cloud and then check out the debug log for more details and clues. First, test to see if the course bookmarks at all by launching, advancing a few slides, exiting and then relaunching. Second, check the debug logs for setValue calls, setting location (cmi.location for SCORM 2004 or cmi.core.lesson_location for SCORM 1.2) or something in the suspend data bucket (cmi.suspend_data). Note: The suspend data bucket could be tricker to understand as technically it can be whatever the course wants it to be and may end up just being internal identifiers.
When I test a course in SCORM Cloud, I get Parser warnings, but my manifest looks great. Are parser warnings something to be concerned about? How can I troubleshoot them?
In most cases, parser warnings are just “warnings” and are much different than the dreaded ERROR. These warnings could be a number of things, like a “bad xml” in the imsmanifest.xml file using identifiers that aren’t valid per the type of identifier specified. This is almost always OK. For completists, you may want to make sure they are corrected, but don’t worry too much about it.
Long story short, if anything looks out of place or you want help deducing what the warning is actually saying, let us know.
Is there a course or certification program in coding or programming in SCORM 1.2/2004?
Unfortunately no. It’s a bummer, but there’s a wealth of content online, like our informational SCORM site for those wanting SCORM 101 all the way to developer resources. I also recommend pipwerks’s SCORM wrapper. Along with a solid SCORM wrapper, they have some great articles as well. Lastly, ask us anything; while we may not have the answers for application specific questions, we can help with eLearning standards based questions.
Questions around LMSs
We are switching LMSs, any recommended questions that we can ask our contenders on their LMS platforms?
I love this question and wish more people would ask it. While we generally will stay out of the “which LMS should I purchase” arena, I am always open to talk through what you should ask your providers. For learning standards, I would start with things like:
- What eLearning standards do you support? Which SCORM versions specifically?
- What does your reporting look like? If my course sets interactions, can I run a report to help analyze my assessments?
- Do you have an LRS? If so, can I report on my xAPI and cmi5 courses from the LMS or do I need to forward my statements somewhere?
- Do you have versioning functionality if I were to update my courses? If so, do you have functionality to choose how the new version is applied?
- Can I run cross domain content?
Migrating data and moving LMSs is always a big undertaking. As you plan for the future, consider how you organize your learning ecosystem. We have a great free eBook on designing your ecosystem with tips on taking inventories of current content and systems, considering how they all works together, questions for both internal stakeholders and external vendors, planning for the future and more.
In addition, we have a new page that explores how Content Controller can supplement your LMS, including making the transition between LMSs as smooth as possible and enhancing features.
Is the data you get out limited by the reporting facility in the LMS?
While we really would love for all LMS’s to support the entirety of the SCORM specification, the reality is that most LMS’s are going to implement what they think is best for their customers and the best for their product. Meaning, while your course may set everything from status to score to progress measure to all those interactions, your LMS must be able to both receive and report on that information.
Can we get this level of tracking with xAPI in SCORM Cloud?
From an xAPI perspective in SCORM Cloud, there are a couple of ways of using the LRS. One would get you some reporting data in SCORM Cloud’s Reportage. If you launch a package directly from SCORM Cloud, we will store the entirety of all of the statements that the course is choosing to send, but only the bits that we would describe as “SCORM parity” will be stored in Reportage. For example, you see things like status, score, time and interactions, but not any of the reporting bits you are likely using xAPI for.
If you are launching externally and pointing your course at the SCORM Cloud LRS, no data would go through to Reportage; however, you do have the opportunity to forward those statements to an analytics tool where you should be able to receive all of the xAPI data, not just SCORM parity.
How do you know how frequently data is sent from SCORM to LMS?
A lot of this will depend on both your course and your LMS and how they behave. From the course side of things, the course will try to persist data that it has cached when it makes a Commit/LMSCommit call. How often it chooses to do this is up to how it was authored.
From an LMS perspective, it may choose to persist things on its own as technically the course doesn’t have to call Commit at all. Some LMSs will persist data based on a span of time.
Wrapping up
SCORM lost completions is still a hot topic, even today. If you find yourself at or above 2%, it can be both frustrating for your learners and overwhelming for you. We help customers and non-customers every day with these concerns. Reach out so we can help you, too, and be sure to check out our SCORM lost completions eBook for more great tips you can refer back to anytime.
