Quiz timeout --
 -- are your students getting locked
out?
The little lock symbol --
-- is intended to show that students are currently taking an online assessment
or survey and the instructor is locked out until the student has completed the
assessment.
If you have a number of
symbols in your gradebook -- and you are sure that your students are not
completing the assessment right now -- you may have the problem that is
described below.
Remember: if you are seeing these symbols now and
the deadline you have given your students is in the next couple of hours, it is
likely that your students really are taking the quiz right now. Do not reset
the assessment unless you are sure that there is a problem.
Quiz timeout problem
A problem that we are encountering is that
students who spend too much time on a quiz (say more than 10 - 15 minutes), time
out, whether they are on the College Network or on dialup. While
the quiz page they are on remains "live", the web server times out and when they
try to submit their quiz, they get an error and you see the little lock on their
attempt. Normally none of their answers is recorded by Blackboard.
There are two solutions to this
problem:
1. Pedagogical Solution
Don't make your quizzes overly long. If you
are posting quizzes approaching 100 questions you may wish to reconsider and
post shorter quizzes. You may wish to ask yourself if it is reasonable for
a student to spend more than an hour doing a quiz online.
2. Technical Solution
| We have installed a "stay alive"
routine on our server that keeps the connection between the student's
machine and the server open while the quiz is being run. What the script
does is open a little browser window in the background which polls the
server to keep the connection alive while the quiz is open.
The window looks like this: |
 |
To invoke this, you must include the following
script in the first question in your quiz.
| <script language=javascript src=http://online.algonquincollege.com/bin/stayalive/quiz.asp></script> |
Notes:
- Students taking the quiz will not see this
script.
- If you are using random question selection
from a pool, you will need to ask one question at the top of your assessment
that is not in the pool, to ensure that the question with the script is
the first question in the assessment.
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