Trim a Long Course Into a Short Refresher

Annual refreshers are a perennial ask. The full onboarding or compliance course was great the first time, but returning learners do not need all forty slides again — they need the ten that changed or that matter most. Re-authoring a trimmed version from the source file is the textbook answer, except the source file is frequently unavailable, and even when it is, carving out a refresher by hand is fiddly work.

Why you cannot just delete slides

Storyline courses hard-code forward navigation: each slide stores the exact ID of the next slide to play. Remove a slide and the one before it now jumps to something that no longer exists — the learner hits a dead end. There is more: the menu still lists the missing slide, and media files shared across slides can be deleted out from under a slide that still needs them. A naive trim produces a course that loads but cannot be completed.

How ScormEdit handles it

• Upload the full course and preview it in the built-in player.
• Check the slides you want to KEEP for the refresher; everything else is dropped.
• ScormEdit repoints every navigation jump to the next kept slide, so the refresher plays start to finish with no dead ends.
• It rebuilds the menu to list only the slides you kept and prunes only media that is genuinely unused (reference-counted at the file level, with caption tracks preserved).
• Repackage a valid SCORM zip with the manifest at the root, ready to upload.

A nice side effect

A shorter course also carries less resume state, which helps if the original was bumping against the SCORM 1.2 suspend_data limit. A trimmed refresher is smaller, faster, and less likely to suffer the "it restarted me from the beginning" problem.

A refresher should feel purpose-built, not like the full course with most of it skipped — and it should still report completion like any other SCORM course.