Jackie, for your situation the issue is from the version of studymate that is installed on the site. It looks like it has a bug and does not escape the ' character correctly. So when the query for updating modinfo was being run, there was a syntax error. Removing that character from the two studymate description fields in that course solves the error.
Hopefully this has been resolved in a later release.
The debugging looked like:
You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near 'll keep loading them week by week. Sorry this one is late... ";s:4:"name";s:21:"' at line 1 (followed by huge query to update modinfo field)
Not sure if this helps anyone else, but I thought I'd post it just in case.