New Assignment Student View Breaks MathJax

[thorine]

The  new student view of assignments with online file submission does not render MathJax. This does not occur when the submission type is paper, as the new view (which is hard to see in my screen shot) does not activate in those cases.

I checked the HTML, and the MathJax tag is still present in the loaded page, but it is not activated. This occurs in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge browsers. I have submitted this problem to my IT department, and they have forwarded it to the vendor (presumably Canvas), but I have heard nothing back. I see no mention of this when searching for "MathJax" in "Current Issues". 

Is there any other place where this can be brought to the developers' attention?

[phillip_mills]

Thanks very much for the updates @erinhmcmillan. FYI I wasn't thinking that you were personally responsible for giving us updates on feature rollbacks. It would, for example, be good if this was communicated somewhere like the Canvas Service Status page. Whilst this wasn't a down server it was a feature that was on and then off, so it could be regarded as something that was. I'll get a colleague of mine to pass that feedback on to our account rep. Thanks again for your help and hope you've had a wonderful weekend.

[thorine]

The worry I had about having what was a bug fixed by a "new feature" rather than fixing the original bug independently of the new feature, was that the new feature could have its own issues that delayed this fix, or if the new feature is removed (for whatever other reason), the bug is re-introduced. That is what has happened here.

I realize the team has to prioritize things, but I think it would make better design sense to fix the issue with [new student view of online-submission assignment not reacting to/loading a MathJax tag] separate from adding the feature [MathJax enabled without need for tags, almost everywhere]. 

But, again, I get that sometimes those choices have to be made.

[thorine]

Are we any closer to turning this back on?

I can appreciate that, when adding a new feature, they want to make sure it does not break any existing features. However, there are two issues with this.

1. This new feature (MathJax everywhere) is also serving to fix a pre-existing bug. If it cannot be deployed, then the existing bug needs to be fixed on its own.
2. If the bug cannot be fixed on its own, then the previous new feature, the new view of student assignments with online submission (introduced December 2020), should be rolled back, since it is causing the bug (by breaking MathJax).

This is going on three months that students cannot see MathJax on their online submission assignments. Printing the page to a PDF and attaching that file is a clunky solution that negates the accessibility features of MathJax. Creating a separate page (not assignment) with MathJax containing the questions is just bad from a design point of view.

[thorine]

The MathJax Everywhere feature seems to be turned back on now for good. Since that fixes the issue, I marked this as solved. Thanks for the feedback.