Monday, June 23, 2008

Sigh ... a compatibility problem ...

Last night, I was trying to upload my second midterm to Blackboard since I wanted the exam to be available to my students by the time they woke up this morning. Unfortunately, I ran into a snag.

I was one of many who upgraded to Firefox 3.0 last week. Much to my chagrin, when I tried to import my exam pool into Blackboard, it claimed my file type was not valid. I was IM'ing a friend during the time I was working on this, and this friend happened to be quite proficient with all things technical. So I was whingeing about the prospect of having to enter all my questions manually when I realised that a lot of extraneous code was being input in the question fields. It was then that I realised that I never experienced problems whilst using Firefox 2.x, or even (gack, gag) Internet Explorer. So I switched the rendering engine from Firefox to IE, and would you believe it, that solved my file incompatibility problem!

Naturally, this problem was discovered at 2.00 in the bloody morning. So I decided to call it quits and wait until the morning to continue my work.

So now the exam is deployed, and my students will have the opportunity to sink their teeth into this exam. I'm a little irritated about the browser incompatibility issue, but oh well ... I'm glad I figured out the problem without having to beg the Blackboard Gurus about it.

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