Quizmaker Recurrent Glitch The Red Banner of Death!

Nov 15, 2017

For most of this year we have been experiencing a persistent glitch in Quizmaker. The same thing happens every time; the student clicks to answer a question, and a red banner appears along the bottom of the screen with the word Incorrect.  This is the screen that is displayed for a wrong answer during a Review of a Quiz after it has been completed.

There seems to be no common feature in the users' systems, it happens in all devices, operating systems and browsers.  The only clue is that 95% of the failures have been in a test embedded in one of the courses.

This started when we converted from Studio 09 to Studio 13 at the start of this year.

Are there any similar experiences out there?  

5 Replies
Alyssa Gomez

Sorry to hear your learners are hitting this, Jon! I know that's got to be frustrating.

I see you also chatted with our Support Engineers about this, and Gren is working with the team to test your file as we speak. I'm going to follow along with your case, and I'll share updates here in this thread as they're available.

If you need to reach us in the meantime, feel free to give me a shout or respond to your case with Gren. 

Tony Mills

Just as an update; with that course (Fuel Tank Safety) only, I've converted it to a 2-Module sequenced course, so that Module 1 has no test and is tracked by Slides Completed. When Module 1 is Completed, ie all slides seen, the user can exit and launch Module 2, which has a title slide, a slide with Notes about the test, the Quizmaker test itself, and a final exit slide.

The purpose of this is to isolate the Quizmaker file from the main body of the course; if we get no failures of the test over the next , say, 50 successful Completions, we know that the problem was something to do with the Course the test was embedded in. If we do get failures, we know that the Quizmaker file is the problem.

It also means that if a failure occurs, we do not have to run the whole course through on the user's account to get to the test to reset it. Until now, when a failure happens we log in to the user's dashboard, and invariably find that "Resume where you left of" takes us to the question showing the red banned. The only escape is to Resume at the start of the course and work through it.

By the way, we are considering using Storyline, if 3 conditions can be satisfied;

1 Doing so will definitely fix the problem with Quizmaker

2. Conversion from Studio 13 works (so far we've found that quite a lot of formatting and colours are changed/lost

3. We can set variable times on slides with no animations. (In S09 and S13 we use silent audio files to achieve this.)

All comments welcomed!

With regards

Jon

Jon Cousens

Cloud Aero Training

Alyssa Gomez

Hi Jon,

I had a look at your case, and I can see you're still working through this issue with Gren. You're in good hands there!

Since you asked about Storyline 3, you can certainly import slides from PowerPoint and questions from a Quizmaker file. You can also build the questions directly in Storyline, if Quizmaker is giving you trouble. 

Since Storyline includes a timeline feature, you can manually adjust slide duration without having to add silent audio files. It's a simple as clicking and dragging the timeline to the desired length. 

Download a free trial for Storyline 3 here, and give it a try. And if you need any help along the way, you know where to find us!

Tony Mills

Thanks for that; at the moment we're watching anxiously as more users complete our Fuel Tank Safety course; to see if it made a difference we turned this into a sequenced 2-Module course, with the Quizmaker test embedded in Module 2 with 3 other slides (Title, Notes, and Final).

If we now get no more failures (Red Banner of Death!) it is clear that the glitch lay in the interaction between the Presenter file for that course and the Quizmaker file. If we do get failures, we know it's the Quizmaker file that's defective.

Since doing the change least week, we have had 17 successful Completions, ie Quizmaker Passes, without a failure. This is not yet statistically significant, (we've had 17 successive Completions many times) but it will be if we get to 50, and if and when we get to 100 we can relax and believe that we may have solved the problem.

Does that make sense? We're fumbling on the dark; you're the experts.

With regards

Jon

Jon Cousens

Cloud Aero Training

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