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Posted: 09/30/2008 4:17:46 PM
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I'm having problems finding a discreet set of guidelines for using a mastery score with lesson status. I'm seeing various LMS vendors (and even different versions of one vendor's LMS) doing different things.
I can understand that if a mastery score is set, and if the lesson status is set to "completed", "passed", or "failed", that the LMS would compare the mastery score with the raw score and possibly reset the lesson status to either "passed" or "failed" based on the scores. What if the lesson status is set to "incomplete", but a score is still sent by the SCO (a value of 0, for example)? Should the LMS override incomplete and set it to failed? What is the correct method to not have the LMS change the status at all, should the score only be sent if the student at least started the test? Our courses on startup initialize the score to 0, get the score from the LMS, and then send the score, lesson status, and suspend data whenever tracking information is sent (all tracking values are sent at the same time). That means that the first time a student launches a course, if they exit almost immediately, the LMS will receive a score of 0 and status of "incomplete". Is it correct for the LMS to set the status to "failed" in that instance? Does the SCORM spec say either way what should happen? Everything I see in the spec either doesn't address this at all or is pretty ambiguous about it.
Thanks.
Also, what's this forum's problem with quotes? It looks like the message text is being HTML-encoded twice.
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Posted: 10/07/2008 4:37:17 PM
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I am not I am an authority on the subject so my answer may not be the "correct" one, however I can tell you how our LMS handles this situation and why.
In our LMS setting a Score at the LMS level is optional. If set at the LMS level the LMS score overrides the SCO based score and the LMS make the determination on pass or fail. However, the LMS score still has to play by the rules though, so in order to evaluate the score and decide pass or fail, the course/exam has to not only be started, but has to be completed before the score is evaluated.
So in your example where the user opens the course/exam and then closes before completion, the score would not be evaluated because the course/exam is still incomplete. Once it is completed, then the eval is done and the Pass, Fail, or reset is determined.
I hope that makes sense and helps answer your question.
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Posted: 10/09/2008 9:24:34 AM
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I assume we are talking about SCORM 1.2 content, right? These terms "lesson status" and mastery score are not used in SCORM 2004.
Scoring and Rollup were not addressed in SCORM 1.2 so how an LMS may handle it will be implementation specific.
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Posted: 10/09/2008 11:53:44 AM
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Yeah this is for SCORM 1.2. I couldn't find anything in the specs that said specifically what needs to happen. That's one of the things that makes working with SCORM so difficult, we have several SCORM-compliant courses and it seems like we always need to tweak things to get it to work with various SCORM-compliant LMSs. It's like a non-standard standard. A few specific LMSs that come to mind are the SumTotal LMS, which shuts off SCO communication when a lesson status value is sent from the SCO (one would assume that communication would stay open until LMSFinish is used, but not so with SumTotal), and the Air Force is also using an LMS that resets a lesson status of "incomplete" if there is not a passing score, when one would assume that incomplete means they haven't even taken the test yet to get a score so the LMS shouldn't do anything if the status is incomplete. It would be nice if SCORM 1.2 was a little more explicit about how things need to work, but reading through the specs sort of gives me the impression that the people who wrote it were not very technical.
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