Moodle in English: Chrome change affecting remotely hosted SCORM/AICC?

Hi folks,

Some of our clients use services from vendors like OpenSesame that provide SCORM or AICC packages that point to remotely hosted content. In this arrangement, the bulk of the content is on the external vendors' servers, and Moodle just hosts a "light" SCORM or AICC package to report completion and interactions from the external site to the LMS. (This allows the content vendors to keep control of their content. They charge a subscription fee for continued access to the content.)

We received a message from OpenSesame indicating that an impending change in Chrome will affect the functionality of these remotely hosted packages. The message is pasted in below; it gives the technical details and indicates that OpenSesame is taking steps to address the issue on their side. My question for the community here is whether there might be any changes needed in the SCORM/AICC module for those of us who want to support this remote-hosted content use case. I'm not requesting that Moodle make this change (if there is one), necessarily; I'm just curious as to whether there's anything that might be done on the LMS side. Thanks for your help.

All the best,

Andy Hicken

Message from OpenSesame:

The OpenSesame partner team wants to alert you of an important browser update which may impact course tracking on LMS platforms. The upcoming release of the Google Chrome browser (Release 78) scheduled for release on 22 October contains a significant change which may impact course tracking in the OpenSesame player and LMS platforms.

Because of the potential impact on our mutual customers, we ask that you reply to this email by 9 October and notify us what your team is doing to prepare for this change. We plan to communicate to customers later this week and anticipate questions in response to the Chrome release.

Chrome 78 release on 22 October

The new Chrome release scheduled to come out on 22 October will disallow posts to external URLs to happen when the browser is closing or navigating away. As a result, courses which are authored to be marked complete on-exit or post data to an external URL (most likely to be AICC in the browser or remote hosted SCORM) may no longer register as complete. In addition, learners’ progression through courses might not be saved. After this release, learning management systems, particularly those recording completion on exit, may fail to receive completions under Chrome.

More information, including Google’s recommendations for a fix can be found here: https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2019/09/chrome-78-deps-rems . Please see the section “Disallow sync XHR in page dismissal”. The quickest change is likely replacing your POST or GET requests with a FETCH having the keepAlive=true set. You can test using Chrome 78 by downloading it here: https://www.google.com/chrome/canary/.

OpenSesame is patching our system in advance of the release. We appreciate your prompt attention to this important matter. If you have any questions, please contact your OpenSesame Partner Manager.

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