Hi has anyone had trouble accessing equations if they were imported from course to another? This is what we are experiencing. Any help is appreciated. We built these using the equation editor not too long ago but now they are appearing all distorted when we import them to other courses.
Rubina, I haven't experienced this, but to be safe you might want to go ahead and escalate this to Canvas Support to see if they can help. To do this click on the Help link in Canvas (from the quiz in question) and report a problem.
I have reported this to Canvas Support, but I'm still waiting for a reply.
I have the same problem, and I have a starting point for Canvas developers to find the solution:
There seems to an issue with the <image class="equation_image" code.
below is an imported question bank
Here's the imported code:
Notice that
<image class="equation_image"
is not the same as the original:
<image class="equation_image"
Here is the Original question in html editor (created using latex equation and Fill in Multiple Blanks.
Works fine in the original course.
The imported question below, shows the same code as above, however:
<img class ="equation_image"
Gets converted to:
<img class="equation_image"
Not sure why this is happening, but would love to have it fixed asap!
We ran into this with chemical equations too. It appears to be a UTF encoding problem because "<" is supposed to translate to a "<" symbol and it's not being translated correctly during the import process.
There was a problem a long time ago (okay a couple of years now), when I was developing quizzes and the multiple choice questions with a less than symbol in them < were getting converted to <
Then, when they were being displayed to the students, it was showing up as < rather than <
My solution at the time was to go look up the unicode characters for less than or less than or equal to and use those instead. That bypassed the html entity conversion and made it look right to the students, even though it wasn't the desired outcome. After a while, Canvas fixed it.
Seeing this thread makes me think of that situation. I think you meant to say html encoding instead of utf encoding, but it was a bug in their conversion process and the programmers had to take care of it. In the meantime, I needed the quiz right away, so that's why I went looking for alternative approaches. Mine wasn't an issue of it copying incorrectly, it was during the creation process itself. Still, it reminds me of the bug so I thought I'd mention that this isn't the first time this has happened, although it may be the first time it has happened recently.
In the meantime people are doing the best thing they can for right now. Report it to Canvas, but then go through the quizzes before you give them out to students. The painful fix is to manually edit each question that is messed up and edit the HTML to remove the paragraph tags and the < replacing it with a <
If you have access to Canvas Data and you're wondering if you have any questions that need fixing, here is an SQL query that will let you know where to look. This assumes that you haven't manually edited the HTML to move the class.
SELECT *
FROM quiz_question_dim
WHERE question_text LIKE '%<img class="equation_image"%';
I wouldn't have added the class to that at all, but in our site, the only place it turned up with a <img was in a class asking about XHTML basics and the < was the correct encoding for that question since they were asking about the img tag. If it had been a < then it would have been an actual image instead of a question about the syntax.
You could spruce that search up to return course and quiz names if you find a lot. Remember that Canvas Data is delayed before you receive it, so you can't copy a course and check it right away with Canvas Data.
Whoops, HTML encoding is what I meant. I guess I had Python on my mind when I said UTF encoding.
I realized that support closed my ticket about this issue without escalating it like they said they would so I reopened it and copied this thread into my ticket. Maybe that will get it some more attention.
Were you able to find an answer to your question? I am going to go ahead and mark this question as answered because there hasn't been any more activity in a while so I assume that you have the information that you need. If you still have a question about this or if you have information that you would like to share with the community, by all means, please do come back and leave a comment. Also, if this question has been answered by one of the previous replies, please feel free to mark that answer as correct.
Robbie
I think we are good for now. There is still no permanent fix. The teachers
are still having to go to the HTML editor, copy the equation and paste it.
It works for now but not having to do that for every equation would be
nice!
Best,
Rubina Dwivedi
HR Manager
Proximity Learning, Inc
600 Congress Ave
14th Floor
Austin, TX 78701
Phone: 830-351-8401
Website: www.proxlearn.com
On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 10:33 AM, rogrant@nmsu.edu <instructure@jiveon.com>
Hi Rubina Dwivedi,
I'm not sure on this one, but I'll definitely share to the Teaching Math in Canvas, Higher Education as well as the K-12 groups! Hopefully we'll get more input from there.