It seems like lately a lot of people have been asking if Articulate Presenter and Articulate Quizmaker work with Moodle. For those of you that don’t know Moodle is a course management system (CMS) – a free, Open Source software package designed using sound pedagogical principles, to help educators create effective online learning communities (that definition came from moodle.org, I have no idea what pedagogical means). For more information on Moodle please visit http://www.moodle.org.
The good news is that Moodle has a SCORM module which allows you to upload any standard SCORM package, which includes Articulate Presenter and Quizmaker content, to include in your course. Both Articulate Presenter and Articulate Quizmaker are certified as SCORM compliant by an independent ADL certification expert which means without having to do anything special Articulate Presenter and Quizmaker will work and report results to Moodle.
The reason this question has come up so often is that Moodle, like many Learning Management Systems, is very complicated and difficult to learn. In the brief video below I have included a demonstration on how to integrate Articulate Presenter content (with an embedded Quizmaker quiz) into Moodle.
As you can see in the demonstration Articulate Presenter and Articulate Quizmaker can work with and report results to Moodle.
Note: Moodle can be a very complicated system to install, like many other Open Source applications, if you are not an advanced computer user. I would recommend getting the help of an advanced user before attempting to install and use Moodle.
For more information on this subject please visit the following sites:
Articulate Presenter SCORM certification information.
Articulate
Moodle
Moodle and SCORM
{ 64 comments… read them below or add one }
Dave,
This is an excellent example of Presenter being used within Moodle.
One nice feature of Articulate Presenter is that you can set the player to be “resizable” for users. Meaning, the player can be minimize and maximized, with the resolution adjusted accordingly.
One drawback to Moodle is the way it “presents” a SCORM module created with Articulate…its framed in an HTML window, so the resizing that was “published” with an Articulate presentation, becomes a non-feature in Moodle, as Moodle doesn’t simply show the Articulate player in native form.
Hey Mark,
Try the feature inside of AP that allows you to launch it in a new window:
1. Open up the presentation in PPT
2. Go to Articulate>Player Template Builder>Launch presentation in new window
This should launch it in a new window even in Moodle.
Note this only works in later versions of moodle (Moodle 1.5.3 and later).
Dave,
What is the advantage of using scorm with moodle versus just using a link to my AP presentations and manually loading them to a separate folder?
I believe the advantage is that if you choose SCORM tracking and reporting will occur, where as if you just use a link you won’t be able to track student progress. I am not sure on this one because I am not really a moodle expert, but that would be my guess.
what setting do you need to use to ensure that the track facility works in Moodle?
We’ve just updated to v1.6 so we’ll see how we get on trying to use Articulate SCORM 1.2 in Moodle.
This tracking function is part of the reason we bought Articulate over other options.
Any help on how to do this will be grafefully recieved. I’m not one for re-nventing the wheel.
Hello Anonymous and Bruce,
If you want to get Articulate content working with moodle all you need to do is publish from AP/QM as SCORM 1.2, then upload the zip package to moodle as shown in the demonstration on my site. Well, that is how it is supposed to work. However, in Moodle 1.6 I have not been able to get the SCORM module to work at all, with any SCORM content, even content not created by Articulate. If you are having specific issue with Moodle it is best if you try to follow up in there forums, as they are the LMS experts.
Articulate presenter/quizmaker combo content as SCORM 1.2 works fine in moodle 1.6 and 1.7.
Except that if you enter a course in review mode then articulate seems to still send the new score to moodle and moodle then happily the results and overwrites the previous ones.
Spoke to Gabe today about it and await the result from the developers.
I think that I’ll probably have to stop letting students see the answers to the quizzes on completion as theyre going to cheat otherwise!!!
Hello,
“Except that if you enter a course in review mode then articulate seems to still send the new score to moodle and moodle then happily the results and overwrites the previous ones.”
Actually this is expected behavior.
I have gotten this question before, and here is the response that I normally use to explain it. Basically the problem is that LMSs don’t handle the data intelligently…or at least that is my understanding.
-When you launch a course in SCORM, there are several “modes” in which it can be launched. These modes are normal, browse and review. Normal means that it is just a normal attempt for credit. Browse means that the learner is “just looking”. Review means that the user has previously completed the course and it now coming back to review the material.
-In most LMS’s after you have completed a course, it moves to your transcript or is otherwise permanently completed.
-In some LMS’s, there is no concept of permanent completion (which sounds like is the case with yours), the LMS just reports back whatever the course says. Furthermore, the LMS leaves it up to the user to decide what mode to launch the course in.
-Currently if we resume a presentation and the user chooses to start from the beginning, we explicitly reset the user’s status to incomplete. We do this by design, re-taking a presentation is a valid use case. If you ask 10 people what the appropriate behavior is when you go back into a presentation, 5 will say you’re old status should persist, 5 would say you should start over (so you can get a higher score on the second attempt). In reality, the LMS should manage this process (like Articulate Online does), but unfortunately in some LMS cases (and maybe other’s) that isn’t always the case.
-Technically, if the course is launched in review mode, you shouldn’t mess with the lesson status. It’s not good practice, but it also shouldn’t matter unless the LMS wants it to matter.
Ups… Sorry I forgot to remove the location… Can you do that for me ???
Not really sure on that one. Basically that message is saying the content can find the LMS’s API. Do you get other content to work, or is it just isolated to Presenter and Quizmaker content? If you don’t have other content I can probably post some Captivate content which will point to the issue being with the content, or with the LMS.
Dave, I can’t see the video. Do you remove it?
Should be fixed now.
HI, I’m also using moodle. I have issues with moodle not being able to find some scorm packages. I searched the moodle forum and it seems this is a common problem. There were a view rather involved suggestions as to how this could be overcome. Just wondering if you have any suggestions.
Hello Andy,
It has been quiet awhile since I played with Moodle, but in my general experience I had problems with:
1. Different builds of Moodle being very unreliable. I would try to find a build that someone has verified works.
2. Some platforms it would work on, others it wouldn’t. I could never get moodle to work on a Linux system, despite the fact that is what it was developed for.
Hope this helps.
Hi Dave, I’m Newbie. I’ve tried your instructions for publishing Quizmaker to SCORM successfully. But, that was from Admin side (I mean, the Quizmaker will be displayed below the main menu. When I tried to login as Student, the Quizmaker didn’t appear. How to use SCORM object from Student side ? Thanks in advanced Dave.
Dave,
I am using Quizmaker to create a survey, adding it to my ppt stack using Presenter and finally uploading the course on Moodle. However, after attempting the survey, I am not able to see the report anywhere in Moodle (or may be I am looking at the wrong places). Please help me extract the survey reports from Moodle. (Btw, I have very little programming knowledge.)
Thanks
Ruchi
Dave,
This is very useful indeed.
I am curious to know the meaning of the LMS metadata fields (Reporting/Tracking) that appears when we publish the course in Articulate.
I have taken a grab and you can view the complete post with the grab here:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=99926#p453289
By default, the settings come as is shown in the attached file; note that under the LMS course information, the Title comes as Assessment. If I keep this default setting while publishing, than after uploading on Moodle, the content page for the SCORM comes as:
Assessment
> IPcenter Overview
which is not how it should appear.
It should come as:
IPcenter Overview
> IPcenter Overview
So, before publishing, I have to change this settings to the name of the module.
Can you explain to me what the fields in the LMS course information and the LMS Lesson SCORM information sections stands for? and where exactly does this information appear or is used?
Thanks,
Ruchi
Looks like I need some help. While trying the instructions that you’ve posted, I’m getting an error message. After I choose the Articulate zipped file within Moodle and click Save Changes, the error message reads “Manifest not found” next to the Course Package section. Any idea what I might be missing?
Hi Cpaolini,
I can think of several reasons this might happen:
1. You aren't publishing for LMS>SCORM. Make sure you publish from AP as LMS>SCORM.
2. Use the ZIP function from Articulate Presenter. If you are using an external zipping program there can be several problems…moodle doesn't like the compression used by that zip program, the imsmanfest.xml is not at the root of the zip file, etc.
3. Bad version/installation of moodle. Moodle versions are often very, very unstable.
If none of those suggestions help, feel free to contact our support department as they have a moodle server that they can test with.
-Dave
First off – Articulate products are terrific! They have made creating and publishing e-learning modules easy & fun.
That said, articulate online proved to be a bit out of our price range because we will be furnishing e-learning to all of our clients and their employees.
I have noticed the same problems a lot of ppl note with moodle.
Does anyone have an LMS they can recommend that might work for me?
Hello, Karen:
I don’t know what your budget is, but I would suggest Chalkboard by Chalk Media (www.chalk.com). It is a full-bodied LCMS which can do anything you would need. It will take any rich media format and has incredibly robust tracking and reporting. Plus the Chalk people like Articulate and have integrated it into their system. Call me at 800-516-3473 if you’d like more information.
Hi Dave.
Thanks a lot for this post. It’s very useful, especially the constant streaming video. My dept just bought Articulate. I plan to use it with Moodle as my LMS.
Currently I am in Test Mode on my localhost and am trying to get Moodle to track the progress of students. I successfully loaded a minicourse using the entire articulate ‘09 suite. I’ve set up Moodle to display topics. The course is an activity under the topics. Everything is running fine, but I can’t track the course.
When I view the ‘activity reports’ in the students profiles, nothing shows up. I was hoping that Moodle would track the students activity and also track if he/she had passed the quiz but nothing shows up.
There must be a way to track Articulate Quizzes a& presentations in Moodle? Can you please help? Or point me to a Articulate Forum post that can help?
Thanks!
Hi Dao,
>When I view the ‘activity reports’ in the students profiles, nothing shows up. I was hoping that Moodle would track the students activity and also track if he/she had passed the quiz but nothing shows up.
Yeah, moodle should do this. I currently have moodle running on a Linux web box and everything in our version of moodle tracks fine.
>There must be a way to track Articulate Quizzes a& presentations in Moodle? Can you please help? Or point me to a Articulate Forum post that can help?
What I would actually recommend doing is going to the moodle forums to see what is up. I know that all of our products do track successfully in moodle when it is configured properly, but as far as troubleshooting why moodle isn’t tracking for you I am probably not the best resource as I know little about moodle.
One suggestion I would have is to skip the whole “localhost” testing and just go with a hosted moodle solution like the one that dreamhost offers. I blogged about it here:
http://www.mozealous.com/?p=121
This is what I have done, and it is working for me and only costs me $99 per year. So rather than spend days trying to hunt down a potential issue with your install, just go with the hosted solution as it is only $99.
Hope this helps.
Hi Dave,
I noticed the post about Chalkboard–Sounds cool! I have also seen that they have been acquired by RIM. I checked out their site and couldnt find anything about an LMS. Did what you were speaking about scrapped? or moved?
thanks…
Clint
Hi Clint,
That post was actually from a different user. I haven’t used Chalkboard and don’t know anything about it unfortunately. Maybe Mark will chime in.
-Dave
Hi,
I’ve been using A. Presenter and QuizMaker for Moodle (scorm package) for a long time. Not everything works fine: it often happens that the lesson status is set to “incomplete” even when the user has finished the exam with the highest mark.
100 out of 100
status: incomplete
The resulting report is “0″ instead of “1″. It is certainly annoying for students, teachers and administrators. Do you have any work aroung this problem? Thank you.
Hi Fernando,
I have not seen the problem with the status being set incorrectly. I am using Moodle 1.9.2 and haven’t had that problem with this release of Moodle. I have had problems with other versions/builds of moodle being buggy though. What version of Moodle are you on?
-Dave
Hello Mozealou
We are running Articulate Presenter/Quiz on Moodle – hosted on local education dept. servers and having real difficulties getting help from the dept – I would be so grateful if you can tell me exactly what we need to set in order to collect quiz results and trace the students’ paths through the tutorial. Ideally, we would like to generate a report to see how long it took them to complete the module, and how long they took on each section. Is this possible? We are piloting this training, it needs to be rolled out in 2 months, hence our urgency/frustrations.
Also, I noticed on your brilliant blog recommendations for hosting, is Dreamhost a good option for hosting? How expensive is Articulate online? We are looking to have this hosted externally once the pilot is completed and changes made.
Many many thanks for any advice
sibilla
Hi Sibilla,
>I would be so grateful if you can tell me exactly what we need to set in order to collect quiz results and trace the students’ paths through the tutorial.
Do you mean on the Articulate side, or on the moodle side? On the Articulate side by default everything will be set to send the quiz results. As far as how to best get the reporting data once it is in Moodle I am likely not the best person to ask as I am not really a moodle expert, so I am not sure on the exact steps to get the reporting data that you need.
>Ideally, we would like to generate a report to see how long it took them to complete the module, and how long they took on each section. Is this possible?
Yeah, we send all that data, so you should be able to find it in the LMS.
Another suggestion would be to check out dokeos:
http://www.mozealous.com/?p=194
It is an open source LMS that is a little more straight forward and has better reporting.
>Dreamhost a good option for hosting?
It depends on what your requirements are. They allow you to do a one click install of Moodle, but don’t actually support moodle, so if you have issues with Moodle itself you are SOL. It also isn’t a %100 reliable host, but then again, you are only paying 99$ per year.
If reliability is the most important thing to you, I don’t think anyone will beat Articulate Online in terms of reliability and support. We spend a LOT of money on making sure Articulate Online is reliable. Reliability, support, and ease of use I know nobody can beat Articulate Online that is currently in the market.
To see our Articulate Online plans check here:
http://www.articulate.com/products/ao-plans.php
If you are looking for a moodle host that provides support for moodle check here:
http://moodle.com/hosting/
Ditto Sibilla! I’ve got Articulate presentations up and running in Moodle but I can’t get Moodle to track and report. I’m not trying to use the quizzes, but the number of slides viewed. I’ve been through Articulate website to ensure the settings are correct and read info in the discussion forumns in Moodle, which directed me here. Any help guidance would be appreciated. I’m lost now! Sonya
I am still struggleing to get it up and running, I decided to download moodle 1.9.4 on our servers and not rely on the dept. only to find that now I am having difficulties uploading the zipped articuate Scrum file – I get the following error: WARNING slas arguments are disabled on this site and objects may not function as expected – is this a Moddle or Articulate setting.
Thanks again for helping.
Sonya, which version of moodle are you using, did you have problems uploading the zipped file?
thanks any advice grately appreciated.
Hi Sibilla,
The error you are getting is from moodle, and from what it sounds like it might be related to IIS. I found this moodle post about the issue:
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=16569
Hi I am running Moodle 1.9.4 everything looks ok, until someone retakes the test and the score is not updated. I can’t seem to figure out why. Also, my scorm seems to stay in Review mode and I do not know how to change it. Thank you for your help.
Hi Rhonda,
What sucks about Moodle is that on each different update they seem to implement a part of the SCORM spec in a different way. My recommendation to anyone who reads this post is to get on a good moodle version and stick on it. The problem you are describing is likely new to Moodle 1.9.4, and this didn’t happen in previous releases. Moodle constantly changing their implementation makes it impossible for content developers to make output that consistently works out of the box without a lot of manual fixing. SABA sucks like this too.
What you can try to do is the following:
1. Navigate to these folders in Windows:
C:\Program Files\Articulate\Presenter\players\template_scorm\lms
C:\Program Files\Articulate\Articulate Quizmaker\content\lms
2. Open the Configuration.js file in notepad
3. Change this line:
var REVIEW_MODE_IS_READ_ONLY = true;
to this:
var REVIEW_MODE_IS_READ_ONLY = false;
4. Save the file and republish
This should correct the issue. What is likely happening is that when you relaunch content in Moodle it is set to review mode, and we check for that when launching our content by default, and if the LMS says it is in review mode we won’t update the score. Changing the line mentioned above will force us to update the score anyway.
Anyway, hope this helps.
Hi,
I’m using moodle 1.9.4 and I have the “WARNING slash arguments are disabled on this site and objects may not function as expected ” error.
My question is, when I go through a module, and complete it (there’s no quiz in the presentation), the status always stays on incomplete-suspended. Is this tied to moodle? Or do I need to do something in Presenter Studio 09′ ? Thank you so much for your help.
I already tried to change the review mode to false, and still I am stuck.
Thanks in advance!
Sorry for one more! I go the slash arguments error fixed, and still the SCORM package does not update the complete/incomplete status. Any thoughts?
Peter,
You might want to give this a shot:
http://www.articulate.com/forums/articulate-presenter/11727-articulate-moodle-not-recognizing-completion.html#post52515
-Dave
Sorry to be a pain but I did comment that line out, but no luck. I have tried on moodle 1.9.2 and moodle 1.9.4
In the moodle details it says this:
Element Value
cmi.core.exit suspend
cmi.suspend_data viewed=1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13|lastviewedslide=13|12#1##,7,7,3,3,7,7,3,3,3,3,7,7,11##b8022f72-9648-4b56-bdfd-e0b9f116f2ac=4.0.2.4,eb5af076-3ea2-4d0d-8da0-976341134117=-1.I,a6885e18-7af0-4361-a0c4-7c7ca0a098f0=3.0.1.2.3,10c0b213-51e8-45cf-8996-41aa31607d27=0.0,#-1
?
Hi Dave,
I’m really sorry to keep writing on this…maybe you should delete my comments! =)
I made a quick dummy presentation in presenter, and making it ‘pass’ by setting it to view only 1 slide. I commented out the line of code and this is what happens: When you first enter moodle, the status still stays on the suspend/incomplete, however, in the reports, it says that it is completed and assigns the right graphic.
Have you encountered this before?
Thank you so much for your help already!
I’m having the same problem (I think) as Peter…
No matter what I do I publish a QuizMaker quiz (I’m on about 15 attempts and quiz installationss in Moodle) but for some reason the quiz won’t complete. Always sits in “Passed – Suspended” status. It’s reporting, but since it’s in suspended status the user can go back in and it starts the quiz over. I turned of “Resume” as well.
Any ideas!?
Hey Dan,
Yeah, unfortunately there is a moodle bug that causes this to happen. I just recently posted a KB about this on our site, and logged the bug with moodle.
The KB is here:
http://www.articulate.com/support/presenter09/kb/?p=1022
Ok, I added the link to the files in the KB, it should be all set.
Hi mozealou,
i’m using moodle 1.9.4+ and articulate suite.
I have the same problem of many other user:
i create a course with articulate presenter, insert one or more quiz with quizmaker, and upload scorm file in moodle.
In moodle (logged as admin or course teacher) i can view the slide viewed by student, the time on each slide, but i don’t have information on quiz result. I only view if the slide with quiz is viewed or not (and the time on slide).
Can you help me??
Thank’s a lot
When importing the zip file into Articulate, how did you get your maximum file size to be 8MB? Mine is set to 2MB and my presentations are larger than that.
Hi Brock,
It has been awhile since I have looked it up, but in order to do this I think you need to set the post_max_size in your PHP.ini file to a higher value. If you google on the moodle forums someone I am sure will have the technical answer for you.
-Dave
Hi Dave,
I have few Articulate elearning courses which are published for web hence the published folder contains “data” “player” and “player.html” is there a way we can use these published files to be uploaded in moodle platform.
Thanks,
Deepak
Hi Deepak,
Is there a reason you can’t republish them for your LMS?
-Dave
Hi Dave, We are at at the juncture where we would like to move these courses from our website to our new moodle site. Instead of saying “few” in my previous note I should have said there are quite a few courses to move on to moodle and some of the courses were built on earlier versions of Articulate and were built by various authors. Also some of the original power point presentations are not available. Hence was looking at various options available to me.
Hi Deepak,
I gotcha, that makes sense. The place that you might run into trouble is that you have various different courses published with various versions of Presenter/Quizmaker, so it won’t be as simple as swapping out a set of files. Trying to walk you through this though is going to be a tad difficult in the comments of this post though, so I’ll see if I can write up what you will need to do and post it in a blog post later today.
As a heads up though, the instructions I give aren’t something that are supported by Articulate and it will be a kinda hacky solution. You will also want to make sure that you test all the content you modify before running it in a production environment because there is always the potential that we might break the modified content, so you will also want to make backups of everything before you modify it.
-Dave
Thanks Dave, will look forward to your new post.