Today, I met the problem, that an Articulate 9 SCORM 1.2 SCO always resets the lesson status to “incomplete” when the learner resumes the learning content (even if the lesson status was completed before).

I found several discussions (like this or this) concerning this issue. In general, the discussions are about whether the CMI or the SCO has to take care about keeping the status “completed”.

In short, the Articulate team consider this to be a CMI concern; they argue:

• In the SCORM standard there is some “wiggle room” for the CMI to interpret the status and they suggest the CMI to copy the learner’s progress to the transcript when the status “completed” has been reached.
• They refer to SCORM’s lesson mode, which should be set to “review” by the CMI to tell the SCO that the student is not taking the SCO for credit and the status should be remain unchanged.
• Their approach works perfect in their Saba LMS.

On the other hand, I totally agree with jsmerisse argumentation in his posts. Summarized, my thoughts are:

• There is an Articulate option SCORE_CAN_ONLY_IMPROVE. Why is there no similar option to freeze the status after is has been reached “completed”?
• The SCORM 1.2 standard says: “If there is no mastery score or completion requirements file, the CMI cannot override lesson determined status” (The SCORM Run-Time Environment, page 3-24)
• There are other LMS systems than the big players (like Saba) that do not implement sophisticated progress transcripts or a “review” launch mode.

To take a long story short, imho an option DO_NOT_RESET_STATUS would be a good solution. Since this option is not available, I’m using the following “hack” (Link) to prevent the SCO from resetting the status to incomplete: Change the following lines in the file lms/lms.js

case "incomplete"
	lmsAPI.ResetStatus();
	break;

to

case "incomplete"
	//lmsAPI.ResetStatus();
	break;