Small Change in the CoursePlus Quiz Generator
On Wednesday, the Center posted a small update to CoursePlus to address a problem that some students taking online quizzes were experiencing. For essay questions in online quizzes using the Quiz Generator in CoursePlus, answers are entered in a window that appears when students click on an "Enter Answer" link. The code that powered this window was pretty old, and began to cause problems with the latest versions of Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9, and Google Chrome. As a result, students would sometimes click on the "Enter Answer" link and the window that should have the rich text editor for entering essay answers would be blank or simply not appear at all. This did not happen all the time, and did not happen in a way that was repeatable in hundreds of tests in different Web browsers, and on different operating systems. It did, however, happen.
The update posted on Wednesday replaces the old essay window code with newer code that should mitigate the problem. This update does not guarantee that students will never have problems of any kind while entering essay question answers. This newer code is currently used in the online courses, and we've had a handful of reports of students having problems entering essay question answers in that environment. However, these problems were not reproducible, even in the over 1,000 tests that we have run in different Web browsers, and on different operating systems. In most cases, students who reported problems also reported having multiple websites open in multiple tabs at the same time in the same browser window, usually running Facebook and Hotmail. While we certainly try to prevent as many problems as possible from occurring, we can't prevent problems on other websites in other open tabs from causing problems with taking online quizzes/exams.
If students have problems while taking online quizzes using the Quiz Generator in CoursePlus, they should contact the Help Support Center right away, as they can work with the student to gather important additional information on why the problem may have occurred in the first place.