Yacapaca

Thanks vikpaw, jemal, saggu, paulkerton and supportman for your very thoughtful answers. You made this one of the easiest decisions I have ever had to take! If only all tech advice was this unequivocal.

Can anyone give me a comparative view of Wonde vs. Groupcall Xporter? Ease of use, security, promptness of support, etc? I am coming from the service supplier side, deciding which one to buy our integrations through, so acceptability to schools is a key decision criterion for me.

Nick, thanks for this. To me it confirms the problem though. It fails very inelegantly if/when the school server is not available externally. What happens with Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps in this situation? Do they simply fall over, or do they have a fallback of some kind? Excuse my nervousness, but this sounds to me like a recipe for a thousand support calls, all blaming us for problems on services we don't control.

@FN-GM (or anyone!) what do Microsoft Office 365 and Google Apps do when the student wants access outside of school? AIFAIK, most LDAP servers are accessible only from within the school network. This is what tripped us up last time.

Thanks FN-GM. I will go back to my team and see if I can change their minds.

FN-GM We are wary of LDAP because our experience from other projects is that LDAP integration with external websites often fails. If you have examples of integrations with externally-hosted sites that are stable and successful, I would really like to investigate them.

Until now, we have left it up to individual teachers to load just the students they want onto Yacapaca. Now we are getting requests for whole-school working. Teachers want student IDs and class affiliations to just automagically appear for them. That's fair enough, but we want to make the process as pain-free and secure as possible for the person who is going to transfer the data out of the MIS. Which routes would you like to see us follow? we have ruled out LDAP and Shibboleth SIF and IMS Enterprise are high-end candidates simple CSV files are the most straightforward what have we missed?

The distilled wisdom on the subject is here. Group Policy seems to be the most usual culprit; I would advocate Michael's test: "logon locally to a machine (as an administrator) and repeat the same test using the same internet connection. If the problem still exists, the probability is that it isn't a GPO problem." Assuming you can't follow FN-GM and switch to Chrome.

That's the trouble with error messages. Half the time they point completely the wrong way. All that Flash really knows is that the download timed out. It has no way of knowing why. Copied from: Quizzes get stuck whilst loading - Yacapaca wiki Quizzes can get stuck whilst loading for a lot of different reasons. Most of them can be summed up in two words: Internet Explorer. Switch to Firefox or any other modern browser, and your problems will most likely go away. Assuming that is politically impossible, work your way down this list of possibilities and you will probably be able to resolve the problem. * the Group Policy is blocking some Yacapaca functions on student computers. This can result in all kinds of weird, intermittent behaviour. If you use Microsoft products on your network, do these first: o Add yacapaca.com to the Allowed List for cookies. o Add https://yacapaca.com to the Trusted Sites list. Note no 'www.' here. * the school's proxy server or filter is blocking images or (particularly) sound files such as MP3s. If this is the case, you will still be able to load quizzes containing only text. * same as above, but the ISP's filter. We have never seen this with commercial ISPs, only Local Authorities, Grids for Learning, Broadband Consortia, etc. * Flash needs re-installing on the problem machine. Flash can be a bit fragile, and sometimes simply reinstalling solves the problem. Typically affects individual computers, not a whole room-full. * the school's network has stalled or is temporarily overloaded. This should only affect you very briefly. If you are stuck in front of a 'loading' icon for over a minute, it is definitely not this. * if one particular quiz refuses to load even on your home computer, but all others load with ease, there may be corruption in the quiz file. Unless you are the author, report it to us.

FN-GM, do either of the following help? I strongly suspect you will have done both already, but who knows.... Add yacapaca.com to the Allowed List for cookies Add https://yacapaca.com to the Trusted Sites list. Note no 'www.' here. There is also a theoretical possiblity that the particular quiz you are testing contains a corrupted image or sound file that is tripping you up. Which specific quiz have you seen the problem on? What happens if you try a quiz from a completely different course? Or one that has no sound or image files? It's highly implausible that this could be the cause, but then we have eliminated all the plausible reasons already. A final thought: you could use Fiddler to inspect exactly what was happening just before your browser crashed, then send the log to us for analysis. I have not used it myself, but have seen it recommended.

So far, we have resisted teacher requests to include video inside Yacapaca quizzes. You have just given me one more reason to continue to do so.

Reason for my question is that it's important to us that Yacapaca play well with proxies. You have a good last-mile connection, but that's rare. Too many schools still connect to the internet via two yoghurt pots and a piece of string; if 200 kids are going to simultaneously take the same quiz, containing the same 10x1M sound files and/or 20-30 images, a proxy is essential.

Michael can you sketch out a plausible scenario whereby the proxy could be to blame? I think we have established that it is not in FN-GM's case, but I'm trying to educate myself about the issue generally.

Just finished an internal meeting about this. The only thing we are sure of is that it's nothing to do with the server, and by extension can't be related to your network either. Whilst a quiz is running the only communication between browser and server is occasional keep-alive GET requests. Other than that, everything runs locally until after the last question has been answered. Possible reasons, therefore: Flash has got corrupted on some machines. IE has got corrupted on some machines. Windows has got corrupted on some machines. - the answer in all cases above is one degree or another of reinstall. The kids have found a way to crash IE (e.g. with some combination of modifier keys and mouseclicks in Flash) and word has got around. Let's face it, winding up the teacher is even more fun than doing a Yacapaca quiz. If it is this, and you can get one of them to confess how the cheat works, I'll definitely owe you a beer!

> It might be a group policy issue but its hard to drill down as it is very Intermittent. Can you expand on this? It's not an area I am familiar with, but with some pointers I would know who to ask. I take it this is something that could plausibly affect only IE and not other browsers?