One of the most common issues I deal with with clients is that their learners sometimes do not have learner progress recorded. The scorm packages that I see associated with this kind of issue are all the same in the way they behave: they initialize and send some data on initial load, and then do not send any data until the last page view of the scorm content. I suspect that somewhere in there the learner (on hotel wireless, traveling, not the best 'net connection, whatever) has network dropped, and when data tries to save, it is not saved, but the SCORM object does not tell them at any time that network connection has been lost. Some vendors create content that only calls LMSCommit() once in a single 20m session, just before LMSFinish()... and according to the SCORM standard this is not incorrect.

It would be great if the Moodle scorm player could check the user's network connection at intervals, and notify the learner if network connection was intermittent or lost. This would preempt these issues with crappy vendor content. From what I can tell, if the network connection is lost, then LMSCommit() and other calls fail but do not return an error message. In my own testing, try/catch on these calls only catches in some browsers, not all.

Based on my own research, I've been able to determine that it is possible to test network failure by injecting an image into the content page with a same-domain src. This test works in webkit and ff. (not in IE). I also tested the .isonline status, but that is not reliable either. So it seems there isn't any reliable cross-browser way of checking the learner's network connection using javascript.

But I wanted to raise the issue here just in case there is a server-side way, that we could access from the scorm player code, of checking the network at intervals during an api session. I know this can add to bandwidth/load stuff, but it would be great, even as an option to turn on if a site had a lot of learners who weren't having their results saved.