Heh, yeah it’s a sad commentary that the subject line of this post is actually what came to mind when troubleshooting a problem with a Blackboard test this morning. For anyone who can’t comprehend such acronymic drek, let me expand that: “Oh My God! Blackboard ‘What You See Is What You Get’ eXtensible Markup Language For The Lose!”

Okay, so that’s still not much more understandable; let me explain. (No, is too much. Let me sum up.)

The problem reported was that students trying to take a final exam in Blackboard while using Internet Explorer were being “routed into a loop” and therefore unable to take the test. (In fact they were being treated to one of those useless Blackboard error code pages.) My first guess was correct; extra code on the test page was executing in IE while not in other browsers. The test consisted of True/False questions, and when I went to modify a question (using Firefox, as IE would obviously not allow me in) I was astounded. There was the equivalent of over a printed page of XML code prefacing the single line of displayed question text.

Judging from the code, it was copy/pasted into Blackboard from Microsoft Word. Word, in its perpetual attempts to be helpful, tried its best to include code that would preserve all the meta-information about this text in the form of XML code… with some unfortunate results. (Actually from what I can tell, this code would have been fine in a standard page, but the interaction with the Blackboard test layout in a Blackboard frameset was sad.)

I can’t claim this is a Word problem, really; I can’t claim this is a Blackboard problem (although it sure would be nice if their Visual Text Box Editor had some automated way to strip out code); in fairness I can’t even claim this is an IE problem (the program is unable to execute the invalid code included on a convoluted page). But it causes quite a problem, that’s for sure.

So, what’s the fix? Tell the faculty to go in and manually strip out all the XML code. (Yeah, that’s going to happen right away.) Otherwise… have the students for this term’s exam NOT use Internet Explorer.