Forums | E-Learning Practitioners

11 October 2012, 11:26

Does anyone have any advice about why students are not able to view PDFs of powerpoint presentations? The files are not hidden,  the lecturer and myself can see the slides on our computers. Students can't see the file names at all. Any help appreciated as the students are getting a little agitated and we are stuck as to what the problem might be! Thanks, Sanam.

11 October 2012, 13:23

Dear Sanam,

There really could be a whole host of reasons why students are not able to view PDFs.  To be able to troubleshoot the problem we'd need to know things like:

Which course on QMplus you're referring to...or is it all courses?

Are all students having problems or only some?

Are they using their own computers or College computers?

What internet browser are they using to access QMplus?

The best thing to to is to raise a ticket on the Helpdesk on http://helpdesk.its.qmul.ac.uk/ giving as many details as you possibly can.  Also, if you can encourage any students who are having problems to raise tickets too that will allow the support team to determine what the problem is as soon as possible.

Gill

11 October 2012, 14:16

Thanks Gill, IT services helpcall already logged by lecturer and an earlier one from myself (id: 80705), no reply hence this post.

Which course on QMplus you're referring to...or is it all courses?

--POLM004, POLM002.

Are all students having problems or only some?

--Most of them, we will ask them to log helpcalls as suggested.

Are they using their own computers or College computers? --

Home computers, mainly laptops.

What internet browser are they using to access QMplus?

--will ask they report this in their helpcall.

Thanks

Sanam

11 October 2012, 14:02

Dear Sanam,

I had a similar problem and in my case the reason was that the whole section in which files were uploaded was made invisible as a default setting. Switching individual files to 'show' mode did not work.

Try the following. Go to Settings while on the main module page, click 'Edit settings', scroll donw a little, change format from 'Collapsed Topic (QMUL)' to 'Weekly format (QMUL)', for example, then scroll down to the bottom and save changes. This format will display new icons for each section, at the right corner. Make sure that all sections (those you want to use) are set up as visible, i.e. all 'eye' icons are open.

Then go back and change the format back to 'Collapsed Topic (QMUL)'. Test the visibility of your files now.

Hope it will help,

Michaela

11 October 2012, 15:12

Sanam, I think Michaela's suggestion might be worth trying.  We did have an outstanding bug regarding the icons for showing and hiding topics in a course being missing from the "Collapsed Topic (QMUL)" course format so it could well be that this is another manifestation of that problem.  I had originally thought that the bug was about the missing icons...I hadn't realised that there's no indication to teaching staff that an entire topic is hidden.

Gill

11 October 2012, 18:03

I also had a similar problem with whole topic areas not showing and found that as Michaela suggested, switching to  a different topic format, unhiding the whole section then switching back helped.

Beth

11 October 2012, 19:04

Hello Michaela

Thank you so much for your reply, tried your suggestion and asked for confirmation from one of the student's concerned so I think the issue has been fixed!

Best wishes & hooray for this forum!

Sanam

11 October 2012, 20:49

I am glad my experience proved to be useful ;)