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Non-role oriented changes

This page tracks changes in 8.3, for everything except role management. For role changes, see 8.3 role work (restricted page).

Initially there are sections here for each tool mentioned in the 8.3 release notes; feel free to add other sections as needed.

Key:

Known Issue

Bug
Need Help

Calendar

Can view day, week, and month.

Known Issue # 72 (creating items on the calendar from the main page of ICON results in those items being marked as private) is still in effect.    
Bug: Looks like users can edit other user's public calendar events.  Investigating....

Chat

Some superficial changes (e.g., now "send" instead of "add" to contribute a message to a chat).  Icons are different.  Basic functionality is the same.  !bug.jpg|thumbnail!Note bug:  cannot add personal contacts to a personal chat; can add by HawkID (or ICON guest ID), but must be letter-accurate.  That is, searching for doe will not return jdoe, but searching for jdoe will work.

Chat session archives are now immediately available. 

Classlist

There are no longer tabs for viewing by instructor/TA. Although you can search by "Roles" it would be nice to add roles to the "View By:" dropdown list.

Groups are now handled with their own tool.  You can view group enrollments in the classlist, but you must use the Groups tool to set up groups.  Note that it is not part of the default navbar; must be added by I-Ds. 

D2L known issue--cannot search by email address.

Content

DAVE WILL INVESTIGATE  New navigational bar above topics, with various links for discussing topic, asking for help, etc.  Also, Under edit topic, there are two new tabs "Discussions" and "Comments."
 Also, Aprille and I (Mandy) are both having trouble posting PowerPoints as HTML.  The directions work in 8.1 but when I create a Content file from the .htm and try to open it in 8.3, I see a blank screen.  This was the case whether I put the .htm file in a directory in the File Manager or in the Course Root.  Jack is investigating this... 

Discussions

You can "pin" a message to the top of a topic's message list to post announcements, rules of conduct, or any other type of message relating to that topic. A "pinned" message will remain at the top no matter how the topic is viewed.

Dropbox

New feature:  "Special Access."  Can be used to allow specific students to submit assignments outside of overall availability dates, can create list of students who can see drop box.   Can  set individualized  availability dates.
New feature:  Instructors can preview dropbox submissions.

Email

Filtering by groups/sections now seems to work; issue with courses not having Address Book shown appears to be fixed.

Still can't put a hyphen in the 'Reply to' Email Address field in "Settings", meaning that people can't put their UI email addresses in that field. 

Grades

After the 8.3 upgrade, all instructors must go back into the gradebook and re-release all grade items with their particular conditions.  It appears that the upgrade process is similar to the movement of course components from one course to another.

A potential bug fix: CTS Known issue 54 "Instructor must revisit the main Grades page before student view of a formula grade item or the final grade in a Formula System gradebook will update" may have been fixed.  In two tests, the student view was updated without the need for the instructor to revisit the gradebook. (NC addition) this worked for me with no problems as well.

"Spreadsheet View" only displays 10 users per page. When switching between Standard View and Spreadsheet View default display is 10 users. If you start with 200 in Standard view, switch to Spreadsheet View, and back to Standard view, you're down to 10 users.

New functionality: Grade categories can be hidden, and release conditions may be applied to categories.

Here's a CTS Known Issue that still appears to be a problem.  I did not see this in D2L's list of known issues for 8.3 so either they are missing something or I am.  CTS Known issue 32 Manually created calculated columns do not reflect dropped grades.   I created a Quizzes category with 3 items in it and set the category to drop the lowest item.  I also created a calculated item that just included the Quizzes category.  8.3 includes a subtotal for a weighted category with multiple items in it.  So in my example, the ICON subtotal and the calculated item I created should be the same.  ICON's subtotal reflected the dropped item and was correct.  The calculated item was off by 5%.

Here's an issue I came across.  If you create a new category in an Excel Spreadsheet and you go to import it as a .csv file without selecting the "Item Creation" box, the system goes to pull the sheet, but just hangs there, no error message, just hanging...for a long time.  I tried it again, and it worked fine, except that it didn't import the new grade item.

CTS Known issue #56--may be resolved.  I could not reproduce this problem in 8.3. "Exported quiz scores may not reflect the correct grade scheme."

CTS Known issue #33--may be resolved.  I could not reproduce this problem in 8.3.  "When ungraded items are dropped, students may see an inaccurate category weight if non-graded items are not included in the calculation.  Final grade is unaffected."

CTS Known issue #21--"If decimal places are not displayed, students may see a discrepancy between the 'out of' grade and the percent grade."  This appears to still be an issue ICON still rounds with both a points view score and with a percent view score.

CTS Known issue #12--"The 'Running Total' feature of the Final Grade n the gradebook may not work as anticipated...If you are weighting grades, and some of the items are ungraded, the ongoing grade may well be skewed.  If you keep the final grade updated throughout the term, remember to not included non-graded items in your final grade calculation..."  This is still the case in 8.3, but seems to only partially a bug in the system and partially a user issue.  The skew is a result of ICON dropping the lowest graded item in the category, not including ungraded items.

CTS Known issue #7-"500 Errors When Grading"  I can't reproduce this problem in 8.3-I used a variety of grade types and did it both in specific grade items and in grade categories.  May not be resolved, though as it appears to be a fairly random and arbitrary occurrence.

CTS Known issue #54- "Instructor must revisit the main grades page before student view of a formula grade item or the final grade in a Formula system gradebook will update".  I couldn't reproduce this in 8.3 so I think this has been resolved. 

D2L Known issue #32133--"If a user creates a points-based system, then switches to a weighted system and furthermore changes a bonus item to ta non-bonus item, the tool might yield an incorrect maximum point value."  This did not occur for me in my attempts to recreate it.

D2L Known issue #32011--"If a user imports a CSV file to Grades and changes item values during the process, the values might not be preserved."  This doesn't seem to be an issue anymore because ICON won't allow the editing of grades at the time of import in 8.3.

D2L Known issue #33724--"If you create a grade category with a weight of 0 and distribute weight evenly across all existing items, an error occurs when you add a new item to the category."  This seems to be resolved.

Bug  8.3 allows you to email a student from their gradebook page.  This works fine and good, but int/desingers who email students this way have their email show up in the student's email box from @icon-test.uiowa.edu instead of @uiowa.edu.  I assume that this will be the same on production.  Could be a role/permission thing, & Dave Long will investigate.

The Gradebook no longer has a Checkbox item option.  It appears as though they have replaced it with a "Pass/Fail" Option, which is a pre-built select box with three choices: "None (default)," "Pass," or "Fail."  This is probably the best alternative to the checkbox item in the gradebook for keeping attendance.

*** 

A change that could be confusing - As before, it's possible to change the sort of names in the Gradebook in two dimensions: click on First Name or Last Name to sort by that field, and click the arrow to direction of the sort on that field. In old version, FirstName-LastName order has no commas between the fields, as normally expected in English. In 8.3 they are separated by commas, so it's easy to confuse it for Lastname-Firstname if the names are unfamiliar. The column heading does reflect this change, but people need to be alert.

A related note about name sorts in the Gradebook - Changing the sort order within a grade item (while grading) does not change the sort in the main user list.  

Groups

Now an independent tool.  Some superficial changes from previous version, but basically the same.  Most notable change is that you can no longer set up Lockers for groups. 

D2L known issue:

  - when students try to use the email tool within Grades, it does not prepopulate the fields with the group members' addresses, rendering it basically useless.  You can still use it like any other email window, but it has no relationship to the groups.

Quizzes 

Bug - When creating special restrictions for quizzes (under Advanced Availability), instructor/designers can see users above their role  in the pop-up window with the list of users (i.e. they see the classlist and admins as well as admin L2s.  At the moment I don't know if they can see other roles).

CTS Known Issues: Bonus items in quizzes are not marked as such.  The issue has not been addressed by D2L and is still present. 

CTS Known Issues:  Quiz grades that have been manually edited may revert.  This issue seems to have been addressed and cannot be replicated under 8.3 (using Mac OS X 10.5, Safari and Firefox). 

D2L Known Issues: Equation based quiz questions are not autograded correctly when the answer is a number with than 4 decimal points.  This issue has been replicated on Iowa's test server and affects all equation-based questions including Significant figure questions. 

HTML editor

HTML editor gives a 500 error when one attempts to change the directory in which an image is to be uploaded.  The error occurs when one attempts to upload the image from one's computer.  The error can be replicated in Safari and Firefox on the Mac; IE on Vista does not display the error.  Whether it gives the error in XP is unknown.

Potential new known issue: Instructors don't appear to have the ability to view the HTML source in most tools where the HTML editor is available.  Content and Widgets are exceptions--instructors can view HTML source there.  This is different than the current version.  In the D2L documentation for 8.3 it seems like instructors should have this option, so it seems like either their documentation is misleading or there's some kind of role problem.  Angie is checking into this.

(Note: this is all for PC) The HTML editor appears very different in Safari than in Firefox or IE.  The New! Improved! HTML editor has 2 tabs, one for basic text editing and one with additional options for inserting links, equations, special characters, etc.  There's also a handy-dandy 'toggle full screen' button so that you can actually increase the size of the HTML editor window.  In Safari, the HTML editor has no tabs and no full-screen toggle.  In other words, it looks just like the old version.

D2L Known Issues:

ID 38583 Symbols don't always display as expected when you add them to HTML files from within the Locker tool.

This is true in both IE and Firefox.  It seemed to apply to characters inserted using the 'Insert Custom Character' button (looks like a little horseshoe).

ID 38654 Text that is formatted as bold or italic in Safari cannot be removed in other browsers.

This is true in both IE and Firefox--the bold and italicized text isn't even recognized as having any formatting.

I couldn't reproduce the other known issues there, but they both said the behaviour "may" happen (eg. 23607 "As of 8.1, if content contains invalid header or body tags it may not display in the Design View of the HTML editor").  No idea what circumstances produce the error (what does "may" mean???).    

Update: I tested this by creating a new widget and pasting in a full HTML document instead of the HTML "fragment" that is expected by the widget system. This kind of thing happens when users create an HTML doc in an external editor (e.g., Dreamweaver) and paste the source into the "plain HTML" mode of D2L's rich text editor.

I pasted in the following:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
	"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
	<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"/>

	<title>untitled</title>

</head>

<body>

<p>This is the widget content!</p>

</body>
</html>

Both the Safari and the "regular" versions of the HTML editor handled this just fine; they stripped away all of the stuff outside the body tag as soon as I hit "save". The only exceptions: both editors left in the meta tag, and the non-Safari editor left in the title tag. But when previewing the widget, even these were stripped out, leaving only the p tag and its contents.

My only guess is that the problem can occur for widgets or other HTML content that was created with older versions of the editor (pre-8.3), and therefore contain head or body tags that they shouldn't. It's just a guess, though.

Homepages Management

Course Tools widget

Updated the URLs for "edit course" and "classlist" in this widget.

Widget release conditions

There is no longer a permission for overriding release conditions on widgets.
TODO:

1. test behavior, e.g., if the Course Tools widget is released to Instructor-Designer, is it invisible to T.A.s/Instructor-Graders/Librarians/Admins/etc.? It seems like it would be.
2. file a ticket.

I noticed that, in my test course, the Course Tools widget was released to Instructor-Designer.  However, when I impersonated an Instructor-Grader, I was still able to see it.  Either that's good because someone overrode the permissions and that's the way it should work.  Or it's bad because the release conditions aren't working...

D2L Known Issues about Homepages:

36342 The Alt text for the Add Widget buttons in the Content/Layout tab of the Edit Homepage page are insufficiently descriptive.

There are several 'add widget' buttons on that page.  I can't see the alt text but I'm going to take D2L's word for it.  Is it a known issue though?

36927 The totals displayed in the Updates widget include items that have release conditions that are unmet.

Yes, this one is true.  To test, I created a quiz and released it to Instructor-Designers only.  However, it appeared in students' updates widget as one of the 'quizzes not attempted'. 

37025 Out of date quizzes are not included in the total for Quizzes Not Attempted in the Updates widget.

Yes, this is true.  If a quiz has passed its end date, it will still appear in the Quizzes Not Attempted tally.  It's going to be confusing because students may see that they have 3 quizzes not attempted.  They click on the link that takes them to their quizzes and there are only 2 quizzes there!

37334 Out of date feedback is included in the total for Dropboxes With Unread Feedback in the Updates widget.

Honestly, I'm not sure what they mean by 'out of date'.  When I view the feedback it no longer appears in the updates widget as Dropboxes with Unread Feedback.  The fact that the drop box has closed seems to have no effect.

38097 After performing a search in the My Courses widget, clicking the browser Back button refreshes the Search My Courses page and the previous page fails to load. 

This is true.  However, students and Instructor-Designers don't have a Search field in the My Courses widget.  In that case, I'm not sure whether we need to log this as a Known Issue.  You can get back to your home page by clicking My Home.

38294 If an active homepage is set as a tool that is deactivated, navigating to the homepage causes an error.

In 8.3 you have the option of designating a tool as your course's homepage (eg. Content).  If you deactivate the tool (through Tools, not by removing it from the NavBar) you will get an error when you navigate to the course home page.

38345 The display options for the Events widget on an active homepage are applied to all instances of the same homepage in the organization.

I tried this with the My Home page.  If I change the display options as one user, those options apply to other users as well, so this seems like an issue.

38400 The notification icons that indicate past and future courses do not display in the My Courses widget.

I couldn't seem to reproduce this.  I did see a notification that "Course access has ended..." for past courses.

Update: This would seem to be a problem!! The non-admin view of the My Courses widget says things like "course access ended 5/25/2005" and "course access begins 8/21/2008", which would make sense if we restricted course access by date... but we don't! This is going to confuse people and cause support calls. This needs investigation and possibly a ticket.

38413 The display and customize options for the Course Default homepage widgets can only be changed at the Org level and not at the course level.

Yes, this is true.  When I set my active homepage to Course Default, there is no Edit icon in the bottom right hand corner of the Course Home page and no 'Edit' options are available on the widgets.

38533 While previewing a homepage, you can modify the homepage widget settings and save your changes from inside the preview window. 

Sort of.  I was able to roll up the widgets but I couldn't click the Edit pencil graphic without getting an error.  I noticed that I could see widgets I wasn't authorized to see (I was impersonating an Instructor-Designer but wasn't able to see Instructor Quicklinks for some reason--I'm not able to edit the widget as an L1 so I can't tell), although inside the widget was an error message saying basically 'you're not authorized to view this'.  So the widget appears in the preview, but the contents aren't visible.

38927 Users are able to add incompatible file types as custom widget thumbnail images.  They appear as broken images in the Manage Widgets page.

In 8.3 you can give your image a thumbnail image (you can see sort of a graphical representation of each widget rather than looking at a list of widget names).  I took "incompatible" to mean file types that aren't images.  It let me save a Word document as a thumbnail image.  It just meant that there was no image (either the default thumbnail or an error) in the Manage Widgets page.

39015 When a user switches roles using the Role Switch widget, all links in the My Admin Tools widget remain visible regardless of the available permissions for the switched role.

Sort of.  Some of the links are still visible when I switch roles (Picture Library) but not all were.  Instructor-Designer doesn't have Role Switch on the My Home page (which is where My Admin Tools is located) so this will only affect Collegiate Admins.

39035 The variable to control the visibility of the option to set a homepage as a tool or URL is missing.

I couldn't find this.  Is this a high-level administrator function?

39076 In the My Courses widget, search results based on course start and end dates are not always accurate.

The search option isn't available to instructors.  There's no explicit way of setting dates (there's just one search field).  I tried putting in semester dates for myself but couldn't tell whether or not they were accurate.

39098 An edit icon is visible in the Google Search system widget on an active homepage.  Clicking the edit icon causes an error.

I couldn't reproduce this.  I added the Google Search widget to my active homepage.  I didn't see an edit icon at all.

39329 Thumbnail images for shared custom widgets that use animated gifs only display at the Org level.

  If someone can figure out how to share widgets, I would love to know.  I spent a long time trying to figure this out and could not find it in D2L's documentation.

39348 The Edit icon is visible beside inactive courses in the My Courses widget.

Yes, this is true.  I might be misunderstanding this, but I'm not sure why it's a known issue.  Shouldn't Instructor-Designers (Instructors-Designer???) have the ability to edit their course site even if it is inactive?  They would need to be able to edit their course in order to make it active.  When a course is inactive, instructors see a notification icon next to the course name on their My Home page.  When they hover over the icon it tells them the course is inactive.   

CTS Known Issues

70 Updates widget doesn't show correct number of available quizzes

The current description says the widget always shows 0 quizzes available.  This no longer seems to be the case--it shows some number of quizzes.  However the D2L Known issues (37025 and 37334) contains some about the Updates widget. 

65 The upgrade to 8.1.3 changed the path of the Quiz tool; Quiz links in areas other than the NavBar may be broken
Is this still the case?  It does seem as though there is some odd business with the course home URL (contains several tildes and seems much longer than in current system).  I'm not sure how to test this on the test system but it's something we need to investigate for the UIHC courses before we upgrade (that's one of the 'special needs' courses).

Update: the business with the tildes and such is confusing, but it's basically cruft left behind by D2L's linking scheme which seems almost designed not to let you use regular, direct URLs. It's unfortunate. The tildes and cruft themselves are basically .NET detritus. For example, clicking a course homepage from the My Courses widget brings me to a URL like this:

https://icon-test.its.uiowa.edu/d2l/orgTools/ouHome/ouHome.asp?d2l_stateGroups=
grid~gridpagenum&d2l_stateScopes=OrgUnitSession~GridPageNum~Search~PageNum
%5EOrgUnitUser~LCS%5EUser~Grid~PageSize~HtmlEditor~HPG&d2l_statePageId=476&
d2l_state_grid=mlg6~0~~Asc~~0&d2l_state_gridpagenum=mlg6_pgN~0&ou=144180

But the "real" URL is this:

https://icon-test.its.uiowa.edu/d2l/orgTools/ouHome/ouHome.asp?&ou=144180

In other words, only the ou parameter is actually significant; the d2l_stategroups stuff is all junk and can be ignored/removed.

48 Custom widgets with quotation marks in the title may cause homepages not to load.

This doesn't seem to be the case.  I put quotation marks in my custom widget.  The quotation marks don't seem to show up and the homepage loads correctly.  I logged out, reset my browser, and tried editing the homepage.  Each time the homepage has loaded correctly.  

Locker

D2L Known Issue 36665 In the Files to Upload area of the Upload Files dialog, there are two 'Browse' buttons. 

They each do different things--one lets you choose a folder to upload the file to, and the other lets you choose the file.  It's weird that they are so close together but I don't think this is a bug or anything we need to put in our Known Issues list.

My Home

No longer lists courses by semester. Now uses search and displays last 10 accessed courses. Very different. Will trip up former users.

BUT!  The plus sign is automatically expanded.  

Schedule

Personal Homepages

Neither students nor instructors can upload an image directly when creating a homepage right in ICON.  When you open the HTML editor there's just no 'upload image' button.  According to something I read on the D2L community site a long time ago, it's by design for students.  Not sure whether this is on purpose for instructors.  Applies to IE, Firefox, and Safari.

User Profile

User Progress

Widget Management

Widgets cannot contain inline Javascript

The new-style widgets don't appear to support inline Javascript. At render time, widget contents like this:

<script type="text/javascript">
document.write( "Hello, world!" );
document.write( '<p>Foo</p>' );
</script>

will be rendered like this:

Problems include:

• line breaks are collapsed
• double quote characters are entity-encoded
• document.write() calls are stripped of embedded html tags (as a security measure?)

Some replacement codes do not work

Specifically, the

{RoleCode}

gets replaced with a null string at the moment. This may be because we're not finished with the role rebuilding process from the 8.3 upgrade; I'm not sure.