Moodle Support

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Instructor support

Student support

Known issues and bugs

1. Unenrolled users remain subscribed to the forums
2. Wimba and Internet Explorer
3. Daylight saving time
4. Files with special characters are not allowed
5. It is not possible to close open/in progress quiz attempts for student
6. It is not possible to search by Internet /Guest ID (x500) in the Assign Roles interface
7. Quiz results page shows Moodle admins
8. Firefox 3 and PDF files
9. Login issues: loop or IP mismatch error
10. "Funny", extra, code-looking characters
11. Students cannot see grades or feedback files in the assignment area

1. Unenrolled users remain subscribed to the forums

In some situations users who are no longer enrolled into a Moodle site remain subscribed to the forums. E.g.:

• Forum was forcing everyone to be subscribed
• Students subscribed themselves, and then were unenrolled

To double-check and change who is subscribed to an individual forum, go to a forum and click "Show/edit current forum subscribers" link in the upper right corner (You will not see the link, if you force everyone to be subscribed, therefore you will need to update forum settings first).

2. Wimba and Internet Explorer

It is not possible to add a new Wimba Activity in Internet Explorer for designers. Please use Firefox instead. Once the activity is added, you may use any browser to participate in it.

3. Daylight saving time

Moodle does not work well with daylight saving time adjustments. Therefore, every time there is a time change, you will need to double-check the due dates to make sure that they are not moved by one hour off.

• DST begins at 2 a.m. March 8, 2009
• DST ends at 2 a.m. November 1, 2009
• DST begins at 2 a.m. March 14, 2010
• DST begins at 2 a.m. November 7, 2010

4. Files with special characters are not allowed

Files with special characters in the titles should not be loaded into the Files area of your site. Later it will not be possible to link to those files, or even remove links to them from your Files area.

5. It is not possible to close open/in progress quiz attempts for students

When a quiz attempt is past its time limit, or when the closing date for a quiz is over, the attempt remains "open".
Usually this happens when a student click "Save without Submit" button, instead of "Submit". Then the quiz closes, so a student can not access it anymore, but the attempt will be marked as "open" (in progress).
Grade for such attempt will not show up in the gradebook, and there is no way for the instructor to manually overwrite anything in such attempt, or force/close a submission.

Solution: Re-open the quiz temporarily, and ask students to click "Save and submit for grading" button.

6. It is not possible to search by Internet /Guest ID (x500) in the Assign Roles interface

Assign Roles interface can be searched by the First/Last name and an email only. Therefore, if a user changes the default email address in the Moodle system, you will not be able to find a person by typing her x500.

7. Quiz results page shows Moodle admins

If an instructor will go to the Quiz Results page and select "Show all students" or "Show students with no attempts only", then the list will also show admins for our Moodle installation, even though they are not enrolled into the course.

8. Firefox 3 and PDF files

9. Login issues: loop or IP mismatch error

Sometimes you may get a "loop" error, which will prevent you from login to Moodle or to any other central system (e.g. http://myu.umn.edu). Also you may get the following text: IP mismatch error.

Usually this kind of "looping" happens when Internet providers  disconnect and reconnect with a different IP address.
Likewise, if the connection is on a wireless network, the connection may be hopping between routers (which would change the IP).

Possible solutions:

• Re-login from central authentication (http://umn.edu/logout) and log back in to Moodle (http://moodle.umn.edu ). However, this will help only until the IP is changed again
• Use stable wired connection, e.g. in computer lab
• Contact the ISP provider and see if they can provide a static IP or an IP that doesn't change often
• If it is not possible to get a static IP, you may download and use the VPN client - http://umn.edu/adcs/help/vpn. It is pretty easy to set up and will ensure a secure and stable connection

Note: if you have changed your Internet ID recently,contact moodle@umn.edu to request a matching change in your Moodle ID. Warning: Do not access Moodle until after your Moodle ID is changed; otherwise, your previous work may be lost.

10. Extra, code-looking characters

Issue 1: Users see some extra formatting characters

Sample: <!-- /* Font Definitions */ @font-face {font-family:"Cambria Math"; panose-1:2 4 5 3 5 4 6 3 2 4; mso-font-charset:1; mso-generic-font-family:roman; mso-font-format:other; mso-font-pitch:variable; mso-font-signature:0 0 0 0 0 0;} @font-face...

Explanation: It means the user pasted directly from Word, which adds its own proprietary code. Please note that such code can break Moodle functionality by making interface unresponsive.

Solution:

• Recommended: Copy/paste from Word into Notepad (or TextEdit on Mac). This will strip off the code. Then copy/paste into Moodle, and use Moodle editor to format text, if needed.
• Or, once you paste into Moodle from Word 2003, locate and push "Cleanup Word Html" icon in the upper right corner of the WYSIWYG text editor (this options usually does not work with MS Word 2007).

Issue 2: Users see extra 'A'-s in the email digests.

Explanation: The email client (groupwise, outlook etc) can add some things, and this is pretty much out of control. For example, if the original post had double lines inserted between sentences, and you view the email later in the HTML format, you may see those A's. If you read in Plain text, then you should not have any issues.
To switch to plain text emails, go to your Moodle profile, click Edit tab, and set Email format to Plain text. (Or tell users to avoid double lines in posts, if this is a real issue).

In addition, there can be different settings for character sets. If on someones machine the < symbol will be displayed as <, on the others the same symbol will be displayed as { .

11. Students cannot see grades or feedback files in the assignment area

Issue 1. If the Assignment grade column is hidden in the gradebook, then students will not see the feedback via the assignment area as well.

Solution: Unhide the assignment column in the gradebook first.

If this is not desired and you want to keep the assignment hidden in the gradebook, then you can use the following work-around:

• Create a separate category in the gradebook for such assignments
• Hide the category via the Categories and Items tab in the gradebook
• Move the assignments into that hidden category and then unhide (!) them. This trick will keep assignments hidden from a student view in the gradebook, but will allow students to see the feedback and grades directly in the assignement area

Quiz, Forum, Glossary, and Database tools are different, and students CAN see their grades from within the activity, even though the corresponding grade item is hidden in the gradebook.

Issue 2. If the instructor uploads the response file back via the assignment tool for a student to review, but does not assign a grade or does not enter text feedback in comments, then the student will not see the response file.

Solution: The instructor has to provide a grade or some written comments for the assignment.

To expedite the process of providing text comments if the issue has already occurred, the instructor can:

• Check Allow quick grading the Assignment submission area
• Put some feedback or just dots (try not to hit enter key after them) in the Comments column.
• Once done, uncheck Send notification emails (optional) and click Save all my feedback at the bottom
• Important: Change your preferences back, by  unchecking Allow Quick Grading feature, since it is not recommended for use