Grades Unavailable
February 12th, 2007
In a developing internet class scandal, the online course software apparently threw 503 errors (”Service Unavailable”) and had major delays (sometimes taking 8 minutes to load a question) during last night’s test. Some students had their browser crash during the test, and were not allowed back in. Others were unable to complete the exam in the allotted time. So, grades have not been released within the 24 hours promised by our syllabus. Thus far, no comment from the professor.
More to come as this exciting story develops…
Do they use the Blackboard software? Or are you forced to use IE with special plugins like MathXL.com requires?
I’ve been disappointed at the low standards web courseware software has. It seems like a market where someone with web savvy could make a killing.
UNT uses WebCT. No special plugins, but IE is required. It isn’t awful, but it isn’t great. Four weeks in, I’m pretty familiar with the interface, but I still have yet to locate things like the server time which is allegedly available on the site. I think in the case of this exam, it was a server load issue, not so much the software itself.