Trying to understand Xerte SCORM Tracking

Hi All,

I'm looking at Xerte for our organisation and was asked to re-produce one of our presentations, enable user tracking and export to a SCORM file.

I'm finding the tracking a little confusing (probably because I'm not understanding it). So far I have created my presentation, it contains 3x YouTube videos, along with a couple of activities and some text pages.

The problem I am seeing is on the (General Results) page at the end of the presentation, a users Average score is no more than 50% with a completion of 94%. My YouTube videos carry a weighting of 1 but also score 0% even if watched completely.

I tried to export and upload to a test LMS, but the LMS always states 'The user did not pass' even through the user did pass because all videos were watched and all activities were completed correctly.

Is there any documentation that explains the tracking in Xerte, or can any of you advise where I am going wrong?

I've never even tried tracking or scoring a video using SCORM, because as far as I know, SCORM does not support video tracking. That saifd, I would have expected a score higher than 50% if all the activities were competed correctly.

SCORM tracking only works from an LMS, so in preview you can see some tracking results but the actual SCORM results may differ. It depends on the type of SCORM and the implementation of the SCORM player within the LMS.

What LMS are you using, and are you willingt to share the SCORM package with me? What version of Xerte are you using?

Hi Tom,

Sorry for the delay in getting back to you, I'm working on a few projects at the moment.

I am able to share the SCORM but not on an open platform - we're a public sector organisation. The LMS we're using was custom built for the department of health by Oracle - It's not an LMS you're going to be familiar with, unless you work within the health sector.

The LMS uses SCORM 1.2, doesn't support 2004 or xAPI - I guess you've just realised who my employer is

Because our Oracle based LMS is live, we've been testing on a free platform called Talent LMS - this is where I was receiving the 50% compliance.

I was not aware that YouTube videos cannot be tracked, maybe what took me in that direction was that when adding a 'YouTube' page, there is a weighting and tracking available to add - so I thought that you could track to see if the user has skipped through the video or watched it completely. But on the flip side, Xerte supports more than just SCORM, so maybe this is available because another format does support it.

In-between writing my first post and this reply, I did manage to achieve 100% compliance with the following configuration

Mode = Full tracking last pass <- at this stage I am still unsure of the differences between First, Last, Minimal etc
Passing score = 93% <- this is because of an MCQ I have within the module
Page time out for completion = 10 seconds
Force Tracking Mode = On <- not sure of the differences between on and off
Restart Session = Do no restart session <- not sure what this brings to the table also...

On the actual YouTube video pages, I changed Tracking Score Weight = 0

So it's working but I'm desperate to learn more about how to manipulate these settings and what they actually mean, what is supported by tracking, what isn't etc. So any advice, links to documents that explain tracking would be appreciated. We have to produce a lot of compliance reporting - so tracking is important to us.

If you do want to see the e-learning module, I can send it to you via email...possibly? If that's an export that Xerte can handle?

Thanks for your time.

Hi
Tom may reply further but a few quick comments:
We have a wiki (linked from the top of pages in the editor) that documents many of the properties and optional properties but it is mostly a reference rather than detailed guidance so won't necessarily answer all your questions but you'll find some notes regarding the tracking optional properties via xerte.org.uk/wiki/doku.php?id=optional_properties
You're right that some of the options apply to other tracking like xAPI rather than SCORM and that includes video tracking.
Your LMS doesn't need to support xAPI but to use all the richer tracking of xAPI you need an LRS (which can be external) and your LMS does then need to support LTI. There are videos from our conferences that cover some of this and I already sent you links to those collections of videos.
The force tracking mode is useful for seeing how the tracking works and the change to some interactions direct in Xerte before exporting to an LMS.
You need to be careful with Page time out for completion because setting that at LO level means that every (non interactive) tracked page has to be viewed for at least that duration (including when you test in the LMS) and for instance if you quickly skip past title or intro pages that's likely to result in less that 100% and/or incomplete status. You can set individual pages to not required for tracking which is worth doing for instance on your first/title page especially if you do have Page time out for completion set to 10 at LO level.
HTH
Ron

Hi,,
I'll try to answer your questions although Ron already answered most of them

Good for you that you managed to get a completion. If you still have questions, send me an export and I'll have a look at the settings (just any export would be fine).

- Youtube
SCORM doesn't support video tracking, but xAPI does. So, yes the tracking options of the video pages are used by xAPI. But you raise a good point, I'll see whther we can add that to the tooltip/documentatoin and make clar that the tracking parameters are meant specifically for xAPI.

- Mode
* Full tracking measn that all the page results + all the answers are tracken. When you choose minimal tracking, only the score of the full page are stored, but not of the individual interactions on the page. For example, if you have a quiz page with 3 quiestions, Full tracking will track the answers to all three questions and the avarage score for the whole quiz. Minimal tracking only tracks the average score.
* First pass, last pass: When you have an interactive page you are able to answer a sepcific question more than once by navigating back to a specific page. First pass, measn that only the first answer will be tracked. Last pass meas that only the last answer will bed tracked (overwriting any previously given answers). This holds specifically for SCORM as there is only room for one answer. For xAPI this is irrelevant, because xAPI can store all answers given.
* Passing score is clear I think. It determines what score you need for the project to marked as passed in SCORM/xAPI
* Page timeout (see Ron's explanation).
* Force tracking mode. In tracking mode (SCORM/xAPI) some pages behave a bit diefferent than when not tracked. To see what happens in preview, or normal play mode, you can enable Force tracking mode. For example, quiz does not offer a Restart button when tracked.
* Restart session: It controls how Xerte should behave when a 'suspended' session/unfinished session is resumed. SCORM (and also xAPI) try to store the stae of the project when stopping a non-completed project. This option controls what shoudl happen if such a project is resumed: Restart, continue where the user left of, or ask the user. FYI SCORM 1.2 in geeral has not enough storage capacity to store the complate state of the project, so it is a bit dependant on the size of the project whether this works as expecedt in SCORM 1.2

I hope this helps you further.