Provide sanity checking or meaningful error information in assignment submissions.
When students upload files (submit assignments) to the BBK12 LMS, they often get errors because they have illegal characters in the filename (The colon being the prevalent example for our students.) Since the error is not informative, our students struggle, make uninformed guesses at how to resolve the issue, and end up not being able to submit their homework in a timely fashion. If the submission process could perform sanity checking and provide feedback, or minimally provide on screen submission guidelines, our students could be relieved of this extra stressor. We do our best at user education and help the faculty and students as issues arise, but if the user experience could be enhanced, we would be immensely grateful.
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Kevin Harig
- Oct 12 2020
- Planned
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The same is true for our school, and it becomes a big issue when files have to be unsubmitted and resubmitted. It is wasted time, and we try to emphasize with our students the importance of writing correctly, with all of the diacritical marks in place. The ñ seems to be the most problematic for Spanish students.
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This is still an issue with students from China, Japan, etc who are studying at our boarding school.
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This is STILL an issue: Blackbaud Case ID 018803068.
Trying to "train the users" is of limited use, as full understanding by non-technical users is limited ("If macOS can use these characters in a filename, why can't Blackbaud?" is the most common reasoning I've encountered).
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The problem has big implications - students in language classes are barred from turning in work with accent marks or Mandarin letters in the title (or at least were last I checked). This is both tough for high level language teachers who expect proper writing in submissions and pretty bad on the inclusivity front.
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Just updating that we'll take a look at this -- thank you!
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Update on earlier comment: the file with an illegal character in its name can be accessed by selecting "Download all files" so the file is submitted successfully and the error (bug) is when you try to access it.
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Students can successfully upload files with illegal characters in the filename that I cannot download. Students report that they don't get an error message on upload when they use Chinese characters, for example. They think that their submission has been successful, but I get the error below when I try to access their file.
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I have attached one of the screenshots provided by a student that shows the generic file transfer error.
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Agreed. The lack of sanity checking is creating reactionary support requests from students and teachers that are already stressed due to hybrid learning.
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Yes! This would be extremely helpful.
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