Cannot Easily Complete SCO_800 Hazardous Weather Training + Bugs

My Scouting Tools Training
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I went through the SCO_800 Hazardous Weather Training lesson but wasted about 2 extra hours today to figure out the pattern to allow me to complete it - eventually I randomly got lucky. It is rife with bugs, some of which are reported in old, closed threads.

  1. The Hot Weather interactive exercise requires dragging cola in the pack for hot weather, but on the next slide it says it’s not the best thing to drink and will require more water. This seems misleading, and you would not assume you should bring soda for hot weather.
  2. The Hot Weather interactive exercise depicts a sleeping bag which is likely one for cold weather, but it’s a bit misleading when the next slide mentions bringing a lightweight sleeping bag.
  3. The Wind Safety Exercise requires you to click the incorrect “don’t worry about…” option. After going through it a second time, I realized in small text at the top it mentions clicking through both the incorrect and correct things.
  4. The Tornado Exercise has an overlapping click area from the “middle of room” going into the “basement” and the basement click area starts about 3/4 or less of the way into the height of that room, so one of my attempts I thought I clicked the basement and got the middle room. (this mistake is what led to my ultimate success in the issues below #6 and #7)
  5. The Hurricanes slide has confusing statements and order of information. It has a brief video then mentions we’ll “take a break” to see what we learned. That break slide is the 5 categories that you click to see what they mean, but that isn’t anything we learned yet, nor is it a break from the brief hurricane intro video which didn’t teach us much at that point.
  6. [This is the one that caused most of my grief and repeating the course many times.] If you click the 4 correct answers on the interaction with the house on the first shot, no Continue button appears. If you click all the wrong answers after that, it still has no “Continue” button. Instead, a small “>” play arrow has to be clicked on the bottom left to get out of that slide, and strangely it automatically takes you to the “Wind Storm” hazard slide. Once you complete the Wind Storm slide, you’ll see that one turns purple on the hazards list slide, but Tornadoes is still white. Even so, it shows Tornadoes as completed in the TOC. After going through the remaining hazards, the “Continue” button did not appear on the list of hazards slide, even though the slide instructions say “after viewing all topics click the Continue button.” I repeated tornadoes 5 times and eventually discovered by accident that clicking a couple correct answers, then a wrong answer, then the final correct answers is the only pattern that seems to make the “Continue” button appear on Tornadoes. When I click Continue which finally appeared, it properly takes me to the hazards slide again and marks Tornadoes as purple (unlike what that small play button was doing). It still shows completed in the TOC, but that process using the Continue button (which again only appears if you click through in a certain pattern) is what seems to also trigger the “Continue” button to appear on the hazards list slide. Success finally - I can get to the Completion slide.
  7. [This also caused a lot of grief and wasted time.] If I exit the lesson and go back in, which I did trying to resolve the above Tornadoes issue, I get a green Adobe Captivate message asking if I wish to continue where I left off. I clicked to continue. Even though the TOC shows all the hazards as completed, it took me to the hazards listing slide and forced me to click through them all again to watch every video and do every interaction once more. It seems that the slide did not recognize they were already completed, so it would not make the final “Continue” button appear without doing them all again.

The course is overall valuable and not bad, so I don’t mean to be harsh. It seems like various bugs have existed in this course for a long time, perhaps changing in form as the course has been updated. I’m applying and training to be a Den Leader, and with this being my final lesson, it left me quite frustrated with a LOT of wasted time. I don’t want others to go through this same experience.

This is on Windows 11 with the latest Google Chrome browser 116.0.5845.110. Not using incognito mode.

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Unfortunately, the most effective way to get changes in consideration on the training courses it to route a change request through your council. Your council professional staff have ways to create tickets with the national organization. I suspect that, if you explain the way these issues create headwinds for getting leaders fully-trained, you’re likely to get some traction with your council. You might want to (also?) work-up through your district and/or council training chairs, as they can advocate with the staff for the changes in the name of getting more folks trained.

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Ok, thanks. I thought this would be the place to report official BSA app and training platform issues. I saw some past topics where they did fix bugs with courses, including this one. I can go that route too. I finally got trained myself, but between the misleading information and the hours lost with it not working right, they need to be aware.

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That would be a reasonable conclusion, given that there’s a Training subcategory.

I agree. There used to be more direct interaction to the LMS “admin” team (i.e. BSA personnel, not the developers themselves) here, and some of the folks involved do still lurk on the boards. However, the “official” route for clarifications and change requests on the content (since that’s more policy than technical) is via the council professionals. The functionality bugs that have been raised may be something that gets picked up here, but one of the SUAC folks probably knows better than I do about that. I suspect not most of the ones you pointed out, since those aren’t of the form “X doesn’t run on Y platform” but rather “X creates < problem description here > and should be revised”.

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@CoreyChapman - that is the official path to having things looked at and fixed

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I’d say it’s worth pointing out here and reporting via council. If nothing else, your thorough explanations could help someone else who is stuck on one of those issues, and we’ve seen many people. And as has been pointed out, sometimes the right person happens to see it and it gets corrected.

1 Like
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Please ask your council to submit a ticket on this. It will go to the programmers. Best avenue for suggested improvements for online training.