[ARCHIVED] Have there been times when "Act as User" incorrectly showed your user's view?

[caroline_foley]

I recently had something come up where, when I "acted as user," I had a different view than what the user was seeing. 

I was thinking that it might be useful to share with one another if there have been other instances so that we have a shared resource when we are trying to troubleshoot as an Admin using this tool.

Please use this space to share times when you also have had a different view in "act as user" than what the user was actually seeing. You may also respond to people's posts if you know of any solutions to the behavior that is being witnessed.

For the first post, I will give more details about the behavior I saw that led me to create this discussion.

Looking forward to sharing this information with one another!

[caroline_foley]

I had a different view when I was in the user's account settings.

When I was in "Act as User," I could see a checkmark next to a new email under Ways to Contact. When I clicked on the checkmark, I could confirm the email address. However, the user did not see a checkmark next to the unconfirmed email.

**I realize that an email is also sent to an user to confirm an email address. The email wasn't working so I was looking for a work around.

[tdelillo]

Just to clarify, was the user using the same browser and same browser version that you used?

[caroline_foley]

I don't know about the first user that first identified the problem, but I then tested it with another non-admin user and that was with the same browser/browser version as when I was "acting as user."

[richard-jerz]

I am not sure if this will help.

I have found that with any LMS, the only way to be sure what a student sees is to have a bogus student login so that I can actually be a student, and see things exactly as a student does.  The "student views" in every LMS are not 100% accurate.

[caroline_foley]

Thanks for that idea, Rick! 

I use a bogus login account as well, but I have also been generally pleased with the "act as user" feature and it is a bit easier than logging into that fake account, especially if you are trying to see what a specific account is viewing.

Part of why I wanted to bring this conversation up was because I was aware that this kind of feature in any LMS is not 100% and I thought it would be useful to share the times that Canvas specifically might not work!

[kona]

 @caroline_foley , we’ve had issues with this, especially for the Inbox. We contacted Canvas Support and they stated what  @richard-jerz  basically said. The only way to be 100% sure is to create an alternate login for the student and then login as the actual student. In general and for most things we use the Act As User, butnif it’s really important or involves the Inbox we create the alternate login. 

Kona

[caroline_foley]

Thanks for the reply,  @kona ! Yes, I agree that the only way to be 100% sure is to create an alternate login, but, as you say, Act as User, is a great tool that is generally pretty accurate. 

When you said that you had issues with the Inbox, was it anything to do with the Inbox or were there particular instances?

[kona]

The problem was that when we did Act as User we weren’t seeing what was really in the student’s Inbox. This had to do with an accusation of harassment so we needed to know for 100% sure that we were seeing exactly what the student was seeing/what they had in their Inbox. 

Does that help?

[caroline_foley]

Yes, thank you for explaining more!

[i_oliveira]

Canvas "Student View" is a somewhat poor simulation of items which are visible to the students in the course.
We learned the hard way that the Student View still inherits some of the Credentials from the account using it.
Our case: a Quiz was created from a Question Bank. In that case every picture in the quiz comes with an authenticator tag https://xyz/picture/download/?auth=[random number] but at that moment there was a bug stripping those codes.
Teachers could see the pictures in the Quiz, admins as well. And teachers and admins could see the pictures using Student View.
When it came to apply the quiz to 100+ students, turned out that actual students couldn't see pictures.
Sadly enough this behavior wasn't documented anywhere and caused major problems for us.

The bug was known by Canvas at the time, but they also failed to communicate, which is even more frustrating.

[caroline_foley]

 @i_oliveira ‌, thanks for adding your instance to this discussion! Definitely something to keep in mind.

[i_oliveira]

 @caroline_foley ‌ I guess my replies started slightly off-topic and ended up far away from the original question, sorry

[richard-jerz]

Ivan, your post caught my interest.  

First, to defend Canvas, there are probably hundreds of bugs in Canvas, maybe thousands, so I am not sure how you expected Canvas to tell you about the bug that you encountered.  When someone uses a feature in Canvas, of course, we assume that it will work.  I am one who does this, and I cannot stop at every point and ask Canvas, "Are there any bugs involving this feature?"  I am not being negative about the Canvas product having bugs, all software products have bugs.

Now, to defend your statement, I am often at a loss about where to find reported bugs.  For example, at the top of this Canvas Community Site, I cannot find any link to "Bug Reports."  So you could be correct that Canvas doesn't communicate bugs very well.  However, if you click on the Canvas upper-left icon, one can get to the main entry into this Canvas Community. Yet, it is not obvious to me where to find "bug reports."  Well, maybe a Canvas support person can guide us to finding bug reports. It might be staring at us and I just don't see it. It is not odd for companies to not want to share this kind of information because some companies think it might make them look bad.  In my own experience with all of the major LMSs (BCDM), only one LMS does a good job sharing bug reports.

Having said this, I think that you might have correctly identified a "bug."  It appears that you were in Student View and doing some quiz editing, which really should not be allowed.  So you probably should have been prevented from doing this.  If I understand what happened to you, this should be reported as a "bug," wherever one does that.  You say that Canvas knew about this, but where?

Somehow, "Student View" is the wrong name for "Student View."  It should really be named something like "Half-Student View," or something else.  Yes, "Student View" does provide some functionality, but it really doesn't make you a true student.

At my university, I cannot add a bogus student on my own.  I have to ask an administrator to add the bogus student for me.  It would be nice to be able to click on "Student View" and have Canvas automatically create a bogus student for you, maybe for 30-minutes, where you could log in as that student and interact as a student in your course, but Canvas doesn't.  Also, at my university, I cannot pose as a student, but I think the administrators can do this.

So, we are left with the reality that if you want to see your course as a student, the best thing to do is to get a bogus student added to your course and log in as that bogus student.

[i_oliveira]

Hi Rick, maybe I didn't make it very clear, so I'll try to better explain the situation:

The ugly quiz bug in a nutshell: Creating a Quiz with questions from a Question Bank would break the link to the pictures in the questions.

The Student View behaviour: As a teacher/admin (in teacher view) I could preview the questions and see all pictures, as a teacher in student view I could take the exam and see the pictures. When logging in as a user with student role and taking the test, the pictures wouldn't show up.

I wouldn't call this problem with the student view a bug. It's an overlooked behaviour that should have been documented and should be made clear whenever you enter Student View. Probably saying that Student View is not a 1:1 of what a student user will see.

About the bug with the question bank/quizzes and why I was so frustrated with the situation:

Instructure knew about the bug before. They already had a patch for the bug when we had the problem (that's what support informed). If they had been quicker in pushing the patch, there would have been no problems.

Why I think they should inform this in a more straight forward way: This is not a bug where you paint a text red and it appears in blue. It is a bug that affects assessment of students (quizzes). A proper response to the situation would have been adding a pop-up once you accessed Question Banks saying "At the moment we are experiencing difficulties with Question Banks, please avoid using pictures...".

The cost of their lack of action was dozens of hours from me and from teachers. Also word goes around in the faculty and this hurts the trust that people had in Canvas.

Frustration for the students: This was a test given simultaneously in 5 classrooms to 100+ students. All of them internationals from all around the world. Most of them never took a digital exam before. It was their first exam on a 2 year masters program. This was pretty much their first experience with Canvas.

[richard-jerz]

Hi Ivan, yes, your explanation is much better.  This was a serious bug, and certainly created one big mess for you, the students, and other instructors.  Canvas should have disabled the feature until they got it to work.  These kinds of bugs and issue can cause some school to explore other LMSs.  People need to understand that when one LMS company says "We can do that." that it doesn't necessarily mean that it works.  "Yes, you can have pictures in quizzes," should have been "Yes, you can go through the motions of adding pictures to quizzes, but we really can do this like other LMSs, yet."  But then your administrators might have picked a different LMS.  Remember, a good Marketing department can sell bad products even when product defects are known (this applies to many products, not just LMSs.)

Yes, Canvas could have added a pop-up, but adding and managing pop-ups might take the programmers more time than simply fixing the problem.

Your situation reminds me about my work with the various LMSs, and in particular, creating quizzes (until I do things about a half dozen times.) I have always demanded that I be given a bogus student, just to check out quizzes (and other things) exactly as a student sees and does them.  In some cases, the IT support staff resists my requests.  But I hold firm, and demand it!  Then, when I see problems, I go back to the IT staff and say, "Did you know that ... doesn't work as expected?"  They do no.  In the case of Canvas, I was part of the experimental faculty team that reviewed this product.  Well, guess what?  I demanded to have two or three bogus students.  My Canvas administrator told me that out of the dozen or so faculty on this evaluation team, I was the only one who asked for bogus users.

I hate to say this, but some LMS administrators don't understand why these products need to be solid performers.  We, as faculty, put a lot of faith into them.  When problems occur, like yours, some administrators would say "just wave your hands and give every student an A for the quiz, or ignore this quiz."  This is one reason why I switched from an old-time (big) LMS.  In the middle of quizzes, it would break!  This particular product was known to break by students.  Around a year ago, I came across a creative video that students at some school made as a parody of this "breaking" problem with that particular LMS.

Well, my guess is that what you learned is to be more cautious, and to always check out anything new that you are trying with a bogus student.

So, I haven't looked, but I wonder what the Canvas docs say about "Student View?"  The docs would be a good place to warn users that Student View has a number of serious limitations, and it would be a good place to list bugs.  I wonder if the Canvas docs clearly state "Do not trust Student View, always check over your course with a bogus student user."

[tdelillo]

I just found an example of this - I created a role that DOES NOT have the "Users - act as" permission. When I (as an admin that DOES that that permission) am masquerading as a person who does NOT have that permission, I still have the "act as" option. If I log in directly to Canvas as that person, I do not have that option. 

[ellen_peters]

I can confirm that this also happens in our situation.

[caroline_foley]

Thank you, tracey.collins10and  @ellen_peters for sharing!