Turning Off the New Rich Content Editor in New Quizzes

[TamasBalogh]

Update (February 1): 

I’d like to provide additional information you may be seeking regarding the new Rich Content Editor (New RCE) in New Quizzes and the issue that led us to turning it off for the time being. Upon the discovery of the issue, we endeavoured to find a plan that would have the least impact on your institutions. This plan involved making some small changes to ensure the least impact to the student experience while we worked on a full solution.

Our first goal after discovering the issue, was to ensure that students could successfully complete their quizzes. This required us to make a quick change to ensure that all new RCE content would render appropriately for students, even after turning the New RCE off for quiz creation. 

There was a short window of time during which students might have had trouble viewing all content. You can see the timeline below:

Timeline

Dec 17: new RCE was turned on in production

Jan 10 18:00-19:00 PM MT: new RCE was turned off

Jan 11 10:00-11:30 AM MT: a fix was released to the old RCE to render new RCE content properly

We are testing a fix in beta over the next few days which will include enabling New RCE for New Quizzes in beta.

At this point we are not able to announce a timeline for when New RCE will be turned on again in production; however, we will continue to keep the Community updated as we make progress and share that date as soon as we can. 

To help you understand the possible impact of the situation for your institution, we have gathered details about various scenarios in the table below. 

	New Quizzes content in its original course	New Quizzes copied with course copy	New Quizzes in a course used as blueprint
New Quizzes Quiz was edited between Dec 17th and Jan 10th, and course content was edited	Your quiz content is viewable by students, but you’ll need to re-upload the content if you want further editing (e.g.: resizing an image)	Rendering might not work for students (in case the student doesn’t have access to the original course which was copied) and you can’t edit the content. You need to re-upload the content.	Rendering might not work for students (in case the student doesn’t have access to the parent course) and you can’t edit the content. You need to re-upload the content.
New Quizzes Quiz was not edited between Dec 17th and Jan 10th	No content is broken for students and it is editable via the old editor.
New Quizzes Quiz was edited between Dec 17th and Jan 10th, but no file, media, image was added	Your New Quiz is functioning as expected.
New Quizzes Quiz was edited after January 11th

In the event that you notice any additional behaviour inconsistent with the scenarios above, please contact support and share what you are experiencing.

Migration from Classic Quizzes to New Quizzes

A Classic Quiz migrated to New Quizzes will function as expected regardless of edit status and time period.

We would like to offer the best experience while migrating Classic Quizzes to New Quizzes so we were waiting for the new RCE to be available in New Quizzes before enabling the Bulk Migration Tool in production. Since we had to turn off the new RCE for a while, we decided to withhold the migration tool until the new RCE will be turned on again. We will turn on the Bulk Migration Tool in production after the new RCE is restored.

Thank you for your patience as we work to resolve this issue. We know this is functionality you all were excited about (we were as well!) and we hope you know this is a top priority for us to get this resolved and back up and running as quickly as possible.

Original post:

We turned on the new Rich Content Editor (RCE) at the very end of last year while most of you were on winter break. You may have noticed the RCE working in production environments when you returned to the office last week.

Unfortunately, we identified a bug that causes content within a quiz (course media, files, pages, etc), or a math equation to improperly copy over during a course copy if it was added to the quiz with the new RCE. The problem is that course content is not copied within the quiz, rather, it remains linked to the original course. In cases when a student doesn’t have access to the original course, the content won’t be viewable by them. We understand that this time of year is one of the busiest periods for copying courses and quizzes and we’d like to avoid any unexpected broken links or objects in this term's courses. We want to make it clear that this only affects New Quiz content that was created after the new RCE was enabled for New Quizzes on December 17, 2022 and then copied to a new course.  

With all this in mind, the best course of action is to disable the new RCE in New Quizzes until the course copy issue is resolved. This means you’ll have access to the original RCE which you’ve used previously. You can expect the following experience for the time being: 

• If you are building a New Quiz from scratch or you are copying a quiz that has not been modified with the new RCE (where no course content or math equations were added since December 17, 2022), your content will be editable and also viewable by students.
• If you have modified your quiz and added any course content or math equations since December 17, 2022, but didn’t copy the quiz into a new course, or only copied within the same course, your students will still be able to see it, but that content won’t be editable. That means in the editor it will look broken, and if you’d like to edit it (e.g. modify the size of an image), you’ll need to delete and re-add the image.

• If you have added course content and copied the quiz outside the original course, your students may not have access to the course content while quiz taking. You will need to delete that content and re-add to your copied quiz in order for you to make edits and ensure it is viewable by all students.

Course content includes the following:

• Course Media and Images
• Course Documents
• Course Links
• User Media and Images
• User Documents

We are actively working on a fix. An update will be provided with a timeline for when you should expect to see New RCE re-enabled for New Quizzes. We are truly sorry for the inconvenience.

[tengrrl]

Hi, 

Thanks for this update. I think I have a related question. Yesterday and earlier in the last week, I could edit the HTML in New Quizzes. Today I can't find the button to edit HTML anywhere in New Quizzes. 

Does the removal of the New RCE explain the situation? It's a critical issue for me, as the inability to edit HTML was why I was not using New Quizzes. If my guess is right, I'll have to redo my work in Classic Quizzes. Spring Semester starts on January 17, so it's a timely issue for me too.

Thanks for your time.

Traci Gardner
Dept of English, Virginia Tech

[jivaan37]

Hello

Thanks for the update and quick reply. I'll be sure to keep an eye on this thread. Looking for the same issue. Bumped into your thread.

[TamasBalogh]

@tengrrl Yes it does. Old RCE doesn't support HTML view, only the new one. As we turned off the new editor, HTML view is not available, until we turn the new editor back on. Unfortunately, as of now it's unknown how long does it take. As I mentioned we are actively working on the fix and try to turn it back on ASAP.

[tengrrl]

Thanks, @TamasBalogh 

I'm giving myself credit for figuring out where the HTML editor went. I've realized it's less work for me to use the Classic Quizzes (Now I don't have to migrate them). I'm just bummed that I figured out regular expressions for fill-in-the-blank and can't show off until next term 😁

I appreciate the fast answer. 

Traci

[ds18]

Thanks for the update. Just noting here that disabling the new RCE in New Quizzes has actually caused content that we uploaded after the update to become unviewable, although it had been accessible before the rollback.

A bit more context - we were on a content creation blitz in late December / early January and created/updated about 1200 questions that included screenshots while the new RCE was enabled for New Quizzes. Last week, I realized the issue with students not having access to the content after it was copied to another course. I was able to resolve the issue for our students by changing File visibility settings to "Institution" for the course where the content was originally uploaded. Since the questions were created in an otherwise empty shell that we only use for question creation and testing, there wasn't any problem doing things that way in our case.

However, after yesterday's rollback of the RCE, that solution is no longer working. All the images we've uploaded between December 17 and January 10 are failing to load for all users (including for me, with admin access to both courses).

EDIT: I did a bit more testing, and to clarify, the issue we're experiencing is that ALL content uploaded in New Quizzes while the new RCE was live appears to be inaccessible, regardless of which course it's in and what permissions a user has. That is to say, not just the third bullet point above, but also the second, appears not to be true for us. To confirm, I tested with a student account in the course where the content was originally uploaded, and it fails to display even there.

[james_whalley]

Ditto to @ds18 about new content being added using the new rce and now it being broken. Please let us know how we can fix this without telling faculty they need to go back into everything they've created and fix all of it manually.

[jborbon]

How do you disable the New RCE for new quizzes?

[audra_agnelly]

Can you let you tier 1 Canvas Support team know about this issue? Myself and a teacher who reported this today got some incorrect information on our support tickets about this, including a response that we don't have New Quizzes enabled in our instance and another response that we can't import New Quizzes from Commons (which we've been doing successfully for ages).

[JenniferAllen1]

I was using png images for students to read, and then answer questions. (I do this with images so that students cannot quickly copy the Spanish text into a translator app.)

Recently all of my images were suddenly only slightly larger than thumbnail size. I was able to change each image in the options to percent so that they showed at 100%. They were then the correct size.

Now, suddenly, my students are unable to view the images at all. When I upload a new image, it is once again very small, with no image options to rectify the error!

This is a huge problem for me, since I use New Quizzes for daily worksheets.

[SamP]

My quiz images aren't displaying in copied courses for the reasons mentioned in this post.  Two questions:

 1) Is Canvas considering any solutions that don't involve going back to the original course and deleting/reuploading the image files? i.e. is there a way for Canvas to deploy a fix that would do this automatically?

2) Can we resolve this now on our end? (by deleting and reuploading)  Or do we need to wait until the new RCE is reenabled?  Just want to avoid needing to do this fix twice.  

[TamasBalogh]

Update: My message could be misunderstood. After the new RCE was turned off, content modified via the new RCE was not properly rendering for students even though that content was not copied to another course (2nd situation). This was fixed last afternoon (01. 11.).

@SamP, @james_whalley, @ds18 Apologies for the troubles again. We've just released a fix for this issue. All your images should work now. 

[schroederbill]

@TamasBalogh just confirming, is this no longer an issue?  We have spent all day working with faculty to update their quizzes and now you are saying everything should work?

[AmberSpargo]

@TamasBalogh This is still an issue for us. We can view them as a teacher but once put in student view, the images can not be seen. 

[TamasBalogh]

@AmberSpargo which situation are you in from the above mentioned three? 

@schroederbill and all, Sorry if I was not clear. When we changed back to the old RCE and pictures were not showing in some cases, even if the content was not copied. We turned off the new RCE to avoid the issue stated in the post. Some, even if they haven't copied a quiz, had issues with the pictures. We solved that one. We are still fixing the original issue.

[LMacaulay]

Is there a way for an ADMIN to see where quizzes were created between December 17-January 10 at the account level?

[pjarosz]

Can you add something that indicates that this is on hold or delayed to the Canvas Updates page (https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Releases/tkb-p/canvas-release)?  It's helpful when a new feature is delayed or pulled back that you can see it immediately on that page (for example, when drag and drop was delayed in RCE).  It's helpful as an Admin to be able to locate that information quickly.  Just a thought.

[JoM]

We have spent 40+ hours creating item banks of questions using the RCE since 19th December.  We are planning for the tests to be run during week of 20th Feb.  I haven't yet copied the quizzes over from our development course but need to know if we will see this error will occur and need to manually re-save questions in all of our banks or is it likely to be patched before then?  

[SamP]

@JoM -- Agreed, there are a lot of moving parts and I'm still not 100% clear on what I need to fix and what will be patched, more visibility and information would be helpful.  I re-added the photos to the original course so am hoping any new copies will function appropriately.  

Math equations are still displaying properly in the student view of the course copies (as opposed to images which were not) - they just aren't editable for teachers any longer and appear as broken images.  But they don't need to be editable in the copied courses for us as long as they are still visible to students. I just hope that visibility won't go away as more changes are made.  

Thank you @TamasBalogh for your work on this and the updates. 

[MrReed]

We are also experiencing issues with copying assignments/pages that include embedded Google files.  Could that be related to these RCE issues?

[TrinaAltman]

@TamasBalogh can you PLEASE provide a page asap that details specifics and timing (e.g., what is the time frame of impact - when was the RCE disabled) and that is updated as things change? Or  add updates to your initial post above? I just skimmed through this thread and am not clear on what is a current issue and what is already fixed if I just read your initial post. 

This is an extremely busy time of year for many schools. Our spring semester starts next week and we need to know current state at any given time. It seems like an email should have gone to Canvas Administrators to notify us of this issue rather than relying on us following community posts super closely at an extremely busy time of year. The release notes about the RCE being enabled in New Quizzes hasn't even been updated to indicate it was pulled back, and I am not seeing anything in the release notes since then stating so (like a special note or page the day the change was reverted so we have a better chance to know it even happened). 

Thank you,

Trina

[BethCrook]

@pjarosz , regarding your post, you should definitely make that a feature request. I think we could vote that up 😉

---

Can you add something that indicates that this is on hold or delayed to the Canvas Updates page (https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Releases/tkb-p/canvas-release)?  It's helpful when a new feature is delayed or pulled back that you can see it immediately on that page (for example, when drag and drop was delayed in RCE).  It's helpful as an Admin to be able to locate that information quickly.  Just a thought.

[HeatherAhern]

The Canvas Release Notes (2022-12-17) have been updated with the date of delay for the RCE in New Quizzes Feature. We apologize for any inconvenience. Please keep an eye out on the Product blog for future updates.

[JASONWILLIAMSPT]

Classic Quizzes are The Way. 

[SarahSandifer]

Is there any way to sign up to get a notification with the new RCE is working? I just did all this work in the New Quizzes and now it isn't available for my students. I am going to have to go back and make the same edits in the older quiz. 

[audra_agnelly]

@TamasBalogh is the RCE work impacting the rendering of LaTex? My elementary math team is reporting the quizzes with LaTex content are slow to render in the browser and are not rendering at all in the printable pdf of the quiz. I just submitted a ticket about this issue (09495115) which includes a link to the screencast of this behavior.

[jrican]

We are having the same issue with the images. What doesn't make sense to me is when you have the questions in the Item bank, why would the images be linked back to the original course. Don't the course copies/quiz copies link to the item bank?

[jvarney5]

Are there any updates for this? It's been over a month since the last one. We create Canvas courses used across the state and developed one for delivery this spring with the expectation that it would roll out with this feature.

Now we're hoping that we'll at least have it for the summer and not needing to workaround the lack of the updated RCE editor for another semester.

[bpfingst]

I'd also be interested in an update on this.  This is a pretty big issue and Instructure doesn't seem to be communicating very well/often about it.

-Brett

[TamasBalogh]

Hi all, I apologize not having an update for you for so long. Last time I was sharing the updates in the end of quarter blog post. We are still working on the fix and then will do internal testing before re-enable the new RCE in beta. You can expect an update with timeline in form of a new blog post in the upcoming weeks. 

[TamasBalogh]

I've posted a quick update on RCE here. 

[nicki_alori]

Hi any update on this please? Or any workaround for the students no longer being able to upload attachments in their essay questions? We are thinking we need to turn all our quizzes back to Classic quizzes to solve the issue and allow them to upload but if a fix is imminent we would rather avoid all the rework. Thanks 

Nicki

[chriscas]

@nicki_alori,

Tamas posted a link to the latest update in the post right above yours.  In case you can't see it for some reason, please head over to  Update on Rich Content Editor in New Quizzes - Instructure Community, which is the latest update as of May 4, 2023.

Hope this helps!

-Chris

[TamasBalogh]

Thanks @chriscas, you were faster 🙂

@nicki_alori,
Actually RCE is already in beta and will be re-released to production in June 17th.