How does completion get triggered in a SCORM package?

When you publish a SCORM package from dominKnow | ONE to your LMS, SCORM is the "language" that the course package and the LMS use to communicate to successfully pass data back and forth.

For course page content, the idea of completion is pretty simple. The course package sends the LMS a completion notice when a learner views a page, based on the page loading.

This is how bookmarking works. If a learner exits a course package part-way through, the LMS knows the last page completed and will open the course up again at that page the next time the learner launches it. (By the way, you can change this default behavior in dominKnow | ONE's Publishing Profile if you wish.)

And that's generally all you need to know to start using SCORM, especially for simpler types of content. 

But here are some of the finer details of this simplicity that might affect less-than simple course projects.

SCORM can track (depending on the version) some things that happen on a page, like what choices a learner made on a question. But those details don't affect the completion status for the page.

For example, how a learner performed on a Practice question page doesn't affect the completion status. Even if the learner never gets the question correct, they still have completed the page from the SCORM tracking perspective.

There are also lots of things that SCORM doesn't or can't track on a page. If a learner leaves a course after watching five minutes of a 12-minute video, the SCORM bookmarking will only be able to restart the learner on the page where the video is. SCORM can't start the video back up at the five-minute mark, because that information isn't tracked by SCORM.

SCORM does store Variables from the course, though, and Variable values do get passed back into the course when it is relaunched. You can use this to help fill in the details of what happened on the page. For example, you could set a variable value for every minute of a video that the learner watches. When the page loads, the variable could be used to tell the video player where to start playing the video so the learner doesn't have to re-watch what they've already seen.

If the learner is on page one and opens the Course Menu and goes to the last page they will only be marked as complete for the first and last pages.

They are not marked complete for pages they skipped over. They still need to view those in order to be marked as complete.

Branching-based content is a unique use case for content completion.

Let's say you have different paths that a learner can take based on selecting different buttons that take them to different pages (rather than just going to the next page in a standard course).

When the learner clicks a button that triggers a Page Branching action they are marked complete for all the pages that precede the landing page in the course structure.  This makes sense - in a branching course you typically have a correct path and some incorrect paths. If the learner chooses a correct option, you don't want them to have to still complete the pages for the incorrect choices.

This does affect how you should design branching-based content. Essentially, you should always make sure the correct final end page is at the end of the course so getting to it marks all other pages as completed along the way.  

In both Flow and Claro, there are really great learning experiences that can be created on just a single page.

In Flow, you can make really great scrolling experiences with multiple sections of content all on one page.

In Claro you can make choice-driven branching activities that use multiple Layers all on a single page. 

Here's something to remember: the completion for a page is sent to the LMS when the learner views the page, which means a one-page course is marked complete when the learner views the page, no matter what they did or didn't do. 

Here's a way to address this:

• Add a second blank page to the project. 
• Turn off the Next button on the first page (so users can't go to the second, blank page).
• Add an Action to trigger a "Complete the Course’s Learning" player control at the end of the content. This will mark all the Pages complete in the LMS. The learner doesn't ever have to go to or know about the second, blank page.

For that action, you have lots of trigger options to suit different types of content. A simple solution is to set it to be triggered when the last piece of content is shown on a page, whether that's at the bottom of a long Flow page or the last thing to be shown on a Claro page. Or maybe you have an even more creative approach. After all, the Action can be fired by so many triggering events.

Here's one more thing about this - use (or create) a navigation bar that doesn't show a Page count so learners aren't confused by seeing two pages but never getting to the second one. 

By default SCORM requires completion of both the content and the passing of the test to trigger a full completion.

There may be some cases, though, where you really only want to know that learners passed the test and it doesn't matter if they completed the content.

In our Publishing Profiles is an option to change the Completion Criteria to just Testing. It's in the SCORM Settings section of the profile options: