eClass Outage Notification Sunday April 1st 2012

Dear eClass users,

We would like to inform you that the eClass (Moodle and Blackboard Vista) systems will be offline this coming Sunday April 1st, 2012 from 8:30 AM to 10:30 AM. We understand that this date might cause some confusion, but please rest assured that this is not a joke. We will be using this brief outage to upgrade a number of Moodle plug-ins. Some of these changes include:

- Enhancements to the eClass course creation and enrollment plug-in

- Improvements to the current U of A Moodle theme

- Improvements to the eClass Live (Elluminate) plug-in

Please do not schedule any teaching or learning tasks during this period. If you have any questions, please contact ctl@ualberta.ca. Thank you for your patience.

Regards,

CTL Technology Services

eClass Moodle HTML Editor Problems

There is a problem with the HTML Editor in eClass Moodle when using the latest version of Firefox, version 11+. The issue occurs when there are 2 or more text entry fields on the same page. The second and subsequent text entry fields do not allow text entry.

This is a known issue with the Tiny MCE HTML editor plugin utilized by Moodle that is being worked on by the Moodle development team. CTL Tech Services will implement a fix for the problem as soon as it is available.

As a workaround in the interim, users who encounter this problem can fix broken text boxes by resizing the editor text-entry display box using the handlebars on the bottom right. See the screenshot below:

You only need to re-size the text box by a small margin and the editor will refresh on the page, allowing text to be entered.

If you are designing activities like quizzes where you can control the number of text entry boxes on a page, you should only allow for 1 entry box to display at a a time so that users do not encounter this problem.

If you have any questions, contact ctl@ualberta.ca.

CTL Tech Services