Cengage/Mindtap Grades not showing up

Cengage/Mindtap Grades not showing up

by Lisa Wiebenga -
Number of replies: 6

I have several faculty using Cengage's Mindtap external tool for Moodle.

We are able to get login passthrough and assignments on the Moodle page, but no grades to pass from Mindtap back to Moodle. I have confirmed through multiple help sessions with Cengage that the plugin is correctly installed and the tool is working as it's supposed to be set up within the course. The Cengage developer team send a message that it's a slash argument issue with our Moodle install (https://docs.moodle.org/311/en/Internet_Information_Services#Slasharguments).  

We followed this:  with no new results. I'm finding Cengage helpdesk unhelpful, and wonder if anyone here has had solution?

  • IIS 7 should support relative path arguments by default. If it does not work try enabling the following in php.ini
  • cgi.fix_pathinfo = 1

with no new results. I'm finding Cengage helpdesk unhelpful, and wonder if anyone here has had solution?

We are running 3.11.1

Thanks in advance for any suggestions!

Lisa


In reply to Lisa Wiebenga

Re: Cengage/Mindtap Grades not showing up

by Emma Richardson -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers
Have you tried changing the slash argument setting? Under Server/HTTP...
In reply to Emma Richardson

Re: Cengage/Mindtap Grades not showing up

by Lisa Wiebenga -
We have not; it's set to ON, with a warning that disabling it might results in things 'not working" - which seems a bit scary!
Have you done something like this with positive results? I'm a little leery of screwing up other plugin packages.




In reply to Lisa Wiebenga

Re: Cengage/Mindtap Grades not showing up

by Emma Richardson -
Picture of Documentation writers Picture of Particularly helpful Moodlers Picture of Plugin developers
I was kind of hoping it was not set on and setting it on might fix your issue! Did you restart apache after making your php.ini changes?
In reply to Emma Richardson

Re: Cengage/Mindtap Grades not showing up

by Perry Way -
She stated the web server was IIS. (Internet Information Server) which is a Microsoft product available on Windows servers.
In reply to Lisa Wiebenga

Re: Cengage/Mindtap Grades not showing up

by Perry Way -
Hello, we have experienced the same thing with many of Cengage features. Also we are on IIS. Cengage keeps tossing the ball back in our court, saying something is not set up properly, but of course everything is and I have confirmed it (I'm the technical administrator for these matters along with author of many custom Moodle modules/reports ). It appears that the issue pertains to either "slash arguments" not being encoded in the manner that IIS can deal with (but Apache can), and/or Moodle session gets interrupted somehow on the inbound aspects of SCORM protocol that Cengage is using thus stimulating a log-in requirement on the in-bound segment (which ultimately resets the session ignoring the inbound post-data/query-fields).

By that I mean Moodle goes outbound to Cengage using SCORM interfacing. Cengage does their thing, then when it comes time to passing the ball back to Moodle, that's where Cengage seems to fall short.

We have spoken with Cengage numerous times on this issue and they have finally admitted they have never tested their product on IIS. They seem reluctant to look at the issue as well since they seem to hold the opinion that nobody runs Moodle on IIS except us (and possibly your firm).

The fellow here who does all the course content preparation for new terms is setting up another meeting with Cengage next week where we will video conference to show our situation to them, but to be honest I don't hold any hopes of them accepting any kind of ownership of the cause of this problem. And I'm uncertain exactly what kind of future this will hold for us.

However if our meeting winds up providing some kind of new in-roads into getting deeper attention on their part, I will return and share my findings here.
In reply to Perry Way

Re: Cengage/Mindtap Grades not showing up

by Perry Way -
I just finished an exhaustive study of the IIS web logs for our site and see clearly the issue results in a loss of session data such that when the dialog comes back inbound from Cengage to Moodle, it cannot hook up correctly (see following), so it causes Moodle to require whoever is using the module to re-log into Moodle. After that login, the session key changes to reflect the new login.

The dialog back to Moodle doesn't appear to be done by way of a query string that would utilize "slash arguments". The traffic coming back to IIS is a POST, not a GET. The query string coming back into Moodle has the form of:

course=(course id)&id=(external tool instance id)&sesskey=(moodle session number)

If there was more to the query string (like a long string of slash arguments) I could troubleshoot more. But IIS does not provide the post data in website log files. And for that matter I don't know any web server that would because post data can be very lengthy like in the case of uploading a file.

So my summary conclusion at this point is the POST data is the root cause of the hangup.