Dispatch Duplicate and Extra Registrations

A problem that affects a small percent of our Dispatch users is the creation of extra or duplicate registrations when a learner launches a Dispatch course. Our support team has worked tirelessly to resolve issues arising from the extraneous registrations–but starting today we’re rolling out a solution to eliminate this unlikely, but annoying bug.

Instanced/Static Registration Toggle: The Short Version

The Dispatches page now has a new dispatch property which can be applied to all existing and future dispatches. Dispatches have their registrations “instanced” by default, which, in some cases, can cause the course host LMS to trigger the creation of extra registrations.

The very short version of this is: if you’ve been having trouble with a Dispatch course creating extra registrations, you should toggle your Dispatch to use “static” registrations, which may eliminate all or some of the unnecessary registrations being created.

The Tradeoff: An Instanced Dispatch Primer

A basic introduction to Dispatch instancing can be found in its announcement article. Switching to static registrations will lose the benefits described in that article–namely a learner cannot restart the same training afresh. (Resuming a course in progress is a core function and is unaffected by these options.)

So why, if instanced registrations provide greater learner flexibility, would we provide an option to switch to static registrations? The explanation to this lies in the technical details of how dispatch instancing works.

A host LMS informs SCORM Cloud a Dispatch registration needs to be instanced by setting entry mode to “ab_initio”, informing SCORM Cloud that this is the first time the content has been launched and a new Dispatch registration needs to be created.

If a host LMS sets ab_initio in error, or fails to include a registrationId in its launch parameters, SCORM Cloud will assume Dispatch instancing is to be used. Thus a host LMS sending incorrect or inaccurate launch data can trigger the creation of new Dispatch registrations.

This is what necessitated the creation of a static registration option for Dispatch. This is a simple method for dealing with the problem and precluding unnecessary Dispatch registrations.

As always, if you have any questions pertaining to SCORM Cloud, please feel free to contact us.