SCORM Lab · checks

Will breaknever-initialized

A SCO that never calls Initialize

The course never opened a SCORM session, so nothing it did was ever tracked.

What you see

The course plays normally and the learner finishes it, but the LMS shows no attempt at all — not incomplete, not failed, simply nothing. Learners insist they completed it and the report disagrees.

What the check looks for

A SCO produced API activity but never called Initialize (SCORM 1.2) or Initialize("") (SCORM 2004) — or never called it successfully.

Why it matters

Initialize is what opens the session. Until it returns true, a conforming LMS is entitled to ignore every other call, and most do. Anything the course sets afterwards lands nowhere.

How to fix it

Find the API discovery code. Almost always the course either could not find the LMS API object and gave up silently, or it called Initialize and ignored a false return value. Both should be loud failures in the course, not silent ones. If the course is built in an authoring tool, re-publishing for the correct SCORM version usually restores the call.

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Stuck on this one, or seeing it only in a particular LMS? That is usually a short conversation — scormspecialist.co.uk.