Articulate presentations freezing after upgrading to Bb 9.1

Jan 18, 2012

Hi,

My program has been using Narrated PPTs with Articulate presenter for several years. We have gone through several Bb upgrades on our university's server and there's always some new bug to worry about. But this time, in the upgrade from Bb 9 to Bb 9.1 there appears to be a new one that effects our Articulate presentations.

Our Bb server team recently upgraded from Bb 9 to 9.1, and we have a multi-server distributed setup.

I am the one who processes most of our presentations and I have Windows 7 with Articulate Studio 9. (have been using that setup for a long time)

The problem we are experiencing is intermittent and apparantly random, effecting 5-10 students out of 400, and a few Instructors her and there. It took 2 weeks before I was able to replicate the following reported problems on my end:

Presentation freezes entirely after a slide change

Audio doesn't play on one or more slides

Slide text and images are missing but audio plays

The problems reported from different people are never the same and seem to span any slides in a presentation and any presentation in the course, but is not experienced by the majority of users. Most of the time when the problems listed above happen, all it takes is the back out of the player using the browser back button, then click back in and it works again, sometimes it takes a clearing of the browser cache too. Either way, the problem is never permanent.

In 9.1, course files are handled in a completely different way than they used to be. I actually really like the new files system in 9.1. I've been asking for the ability to manage files like this for years. Instead of just attaching a zip package in a module and telling it where to open from, you actually have a file explorer, where you can drag and drop your files into the course in bulk, then in your content area, you link to the player.html for each lecture from there.

My guess at the cause of this problem, is that the new file system in Bb 9.1 isn't all that stable, or file access time is slow (or at least in OUR install of it). So when the player.html and flash elements try to access the audio, or the other slide content associated with them, once in a while it can't find those files fast enough, so it either doesn't display them, or the whole player just locks up since it can't access the files it needs to to continue playing.

Has anyone else reported this kind of issue? Or is it just us? Does my guess at an explanation sound possible?

Thanks

Caelyn

3 Replies
Caelyn Nagle

Peter Anderson said:

Hi Caelyn,

Due to the isolated nature of the issues you're describing, I'm not sure that this will be helpful, but have you had a chance to look at our KB on Blackboard?:

http://www.articulate.com/support/presenter09/kb/?p=3288

Hope that's helpful!

Thanks for the reply Pete. Unfortunately, that isn't the same kind of problem. Our lectures can load and play for most people, so it's likely not related to the XML caching problem. It is likely a problem with the new Bb file system in 9.1, as there have been several other file system problems our administrators are working to fix. I was just hoping I could find that this issue with Articulate in 9.1 was a known problem. cause when I try to suggest my ideas on the cause to Admins, they often don't take my opinion into account unless I can show them corroborating evidence.

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