How to Upload a SCORM Course to Docebo

Docebo handles SCORM reliably once you understand its model, and the first upload is where most people get confused — because in Docebo a "course" is a container, and your SCORM package is a piece of training material inside it. Those are two separate things to create.

What is the upload path?

Four steps, in this order:

• Create the course. In the admin menu, go to Course Management and add a new course. Choose the E-Learning type — this is the one that holds self-paced material.
• Open the Training Material section of the course you just created.
• Add training material and choose SCORM as the type.
• Upload the ZIP exactly as exported, and wait for processing to finish before navigating away.

Menu wording varies a little between Docebo releases and depending on which modules your organisation has enabled, so treat the labels as approximate and the sequence as reliable.

What should I know about the ZIP?

Upload the exported file unopened. Do not extract it, rename files inside it, or re-zip it from a folder — re-zipping typically nests the manifest one level deeper than the standard allows, which is the single most common reason a package is rejected.

Export as SCORM 1.2 unless you have a specific reason not to. It is the most broadly supported version and it is sufficient for any course that reports completion and a score.

How does Docebo decide someone has completed the course?

This is the part worth understanding properly, because Docebo separates two things:

The training material reports its own status — completed, passed, failed, in progress — based on what the SCORM package sends. The course then has its own completion rule, which by default requires all training material to be completed.

If a course contains your SCORM package plus a survey and a file, the learner is not complete until all three are done. Someone reporting that they "finished the course but it says incomplete" has almost always finished the SCORM and not the other items.

Which settings are worth changing?

• How the material opens. Whether it launches in the same window or a new one affects the reliability of completion reporting; a new window with the learner closing it early is a common cause of lost progress.
• Attempt limits and scoring. Unlimited attempts suits training; a limit suits assessment. Decide rather than accept the default.
• Whether the material is mandatory for course completion — relevant as soon as a course contains more than one item.
• Enrolment and validity. If your organisation uses expiry for compliance training, set it here rather than tracking renewals in a spreadsheet.

Why is progress not saving?

Three usual causes. The learner closed the window rather than reaching the end, so the final communication never happened. The session timed out during a long module — worth knowing if your courses run past thirty minutes. Or browser privacy settings blocked storage in the frame the package runs in, which appears most often in Safari and in locked-down corporate browsers.

Before investigating deeply, have someone complete the course start to finish in one sitting, reaching the last page. If that records correctly, the package is fine and you are looking at a behaviour or environment problem rather than a packaging one.

How do I update the content later?

Export the revised course and upload it as a new version of the existing training material where your Docebo configuration allows it, which preserves the course structure and enrolments. Replacing material can affect existing completion records, so check the behaviour on a test course before doing it to something with live enrolments.

Keep the exported ZIP for every version you deploy. When someone asks in two years what a person completed in October, that file is the only thing that answers it.

A note on central catalogues

If you are publishing into a catalogue rather than a single course, the description, thumbnail and category are doing marketing work inside your own organisation. A course listed as "Untitled SCORM Package" with no description gets ignored regardless of quality, and it is a two-minute fix at upload time.

The same applies to the course title itself. Docebo shows it in enrolment emails, in the learner's course list and in reports, so a title that reads clearly out of context — naming the subject rather than the project it came from — saves a great deal of explaining later.