Joseph Rézeau

For your first question, see my answer in your other post on the same topic.

Is [the "Maximum Number of attempts"] option only active for questions that are graded? 

Yes, of course. Well, it depends what you call "graded". Graded questions are ALL questions except Essay. Non-graded questions are called Content pages. And this notion of graded/ungraded has nothing to do with the Practice lesson setting.

"Do most of the settings in Lesson depend on the questions being graded?"

It depends what you call "most settings" and what you call "graded" (see above).

Sorry if my answers do not sound satisfying, but again the Lesson activity settings are quite complicated to manage, the behaviour of the Lesson can be difficult to understand and the interface needs a serious re-vamping.

Joseph

The reason for this behaviour is that you set both option "Provide option to try a question again" to Yes and "Maximum number of attempts" greater than 1. These options are incompatible! Actually, I've always thought that the "Provide option to try a question again" is misleading and should never be used.

What you call an endless cycle is not endless. If the student keeps selecting the wrong answer, and you have set both options as explained above, then the student will be stuck on the same page for as many times as the "Maximum number of attempts" you set!

OK now?

Joseph

Hi Allida,

1.- "Where/how do you update the jump for the option No" Sorry Which "option No do you mean"?

2.- "I discovered in the forum that the Number of attempts option is over ridden if you use the try question again option."

Yes, this is correct.

  "So it seems the students can end up in an endless cycle."

What do you mean by "endless cycle"?

3.- "I don't want the students to go to the next question.  I want them to go to the next page"

In the Lesson activity, a "question" and a "page" are the same object. So again I do not get your meaning.

4.- "I would like students to have the option to try the question again.  That seems straightforward."

Well, if you set the Number of attempts option to a number greater than 0, the students will be able to try to answer your questions as many times as that Number of attempts number. That is straightforward.

5.- "Has anyone created an if - then  grid for the Lesson options?  It would save a lot of time if you didn't have to discover for yourself what options over ride other options."

The answer is "No, not to my knowledge". As you have found out the (too?) large number of options available in the Lesson module makes it extremely difficult to understand the interactions between those options. It would be a daunting task to write the "grid" you want. The Lesson activity is a powerful, it offers lots of possibilities, but its interface needs a good re-vamp. That is in the pipeline, but probably not any time soon. In the meantime I suggest using the Lesson "as is", without playing too much with its default settings, and only changing them one at a time, to observe the consequences. There is no reason that you cannot achieve what you want to do, but you'll have to keep experimenting.

Joseph

Hello,

Since a couple of days I am experiencing a weird problem on my local Moodle sites. Page stops displaying after the header or the breadcrumb. I have searched these forums and the documentation, and have found descriptions of similar problems, although not quite what I'm experiencing

1. My environment. This is a local XAMPP installation on a Windows 7 computer. PHP Version 5.5.15. To check the problem I have made fresh XAMPP and Moodle 2.7.2+ installations.
2. The problem is independent of a) the database type installed (same problem occurs on a mysql and on a PostGRES db).
3. The problem is independent of the browser used (tested Fire-fox, MSIE and Chrome). It is also independent of the Moodle theme being used.
4. The problem does not occur on older Moodle versions (prior to 2.6) but it occurs from version 2.6 onwards. I have not seen the problem occur when logged in as Student, only when logged in as Teacher or Admin.
   1. The problem is not systematic but episodic. However here is a description of the current symptoms. Sometimes, it happens as soon as I launch my moodle site with the http://localhost/moodle27/moodle/index.php address in my browser. The browser displays the course name (top left) and the You are not logged in. (Log in)" message (top right), the rest of the page is empty.
   2. Often the problem occurs when I click the Turn editing on button when inside a course. Then, either the page stops displaying just after the breadcrumbs OR after Section 0, but some icons are missing.
   3. It systematically occurs if I try to restore a course. At the last stage, I am stuck with the breadcrumb frozen.
5. In most cases I can "un-freeze" the page simply by going to the address bar in the browser and just reloading the page. Sometimes I have to reload the page twice, sometimes the reloading throws an error. But mostly I can by-pass the freeze. But of course this workaround is not acceptable in the long run.
6. What have I done to diagnose the problem? The documentation at Installation_FAQ#Why_is_a_particular_page_blank_or_incomplete.3F gives some advice, which I have followed. However I think my problem is different from the one described there.
   1. Check your web server log files. I find nothing apparently related to my problem in those log files. Anyway, here we go. This is what I see/get immediately after a page freeze:

   2. HTLM source:
          <header id="page-header" class="clearfix">
              <h1>Course 01</h1>        <div id="page-navbar" class="clearfix">
      [...]
             </div>
          </header>
      
          <div id="page-content" class="row-fluid">
              <div id="region-bs-main-and-pre" class="span9">
                  <div class="row-fluid">
                      <section id="region-main" class="span8 pull-right">
                          <div role="main"><span id="maincontent"></span>
      
      server/apache/logs/error.log
      This is the very last message in the log:
      [Thu Oct 16 15:09:27.451171 2014] [mpm_winnt:notice] [pid 2292:tid 272] AH00354: 
      Child: Starting 150 worker threads.
      
      server/php/logs/php_error_log
      nothing there
      
      server/apache/logs/access.log
      This is the very last message in the log:
      ::1 - - [16/Oct/2014:15:19:36 +0200] "GET /moodle/course/view.php?id=2&notifyeditingon=1 HTTP/1.1" 200 91455 "http://localhost/moodle/course/view.php?id=2" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:32.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/32.0"
      
      Note I can post those results (before the page freeze and after reloading the page) if needed: Caches used (hits/misses/sets) etc.

7. Possible reasons?
   1. What comes to mind immediately is a lack of memory, since the freeze happens mostly when more "activity" is generated by Moodle. I have lots of RAM installed on my machine and monitoring shows that about 50% of memory is being used. I have increaded max_execution_time limit from 30 to 300 in php.ini, it does not change anything.
   2. As I said, this problem occurred "out of the blue" 2 days ago. I do not recall doing anything special to my Windows installation then, and I had never had this problem before.
   3. If no solution is found then I'll have to resort to the last extremity of re-installing Windows and all the software, but I would really like to avoid such a desperate solution.

Any solution welcome, including suggestions for more tests. This weird and irritating problem is really blocking all my current Moodle development and QA testing at the moment.

Joseph

Merci de te pencher sur mon cas, Didier.

Je ne suis toujours pas plus avancé. J'ai fait une installation neuve de XAMPP et Moodle sur ma machine locale. C'est un peu mieux, mais j'ai encore régulièrement des plantages d'affichage de la page, et je suis obligé de relancer la page.

Aucun problème de mémoire disponible, j'ai toujours environ 50% de mémoire physique disponible. RAS dans phpMyAdmin. En bref, tous les voyants sont au vert, et toujours les plantages inexplicables. Et bien sûr aucune encombrement de mon localhost puisque je suis le seul connecté !

J'attends encore un peu avant de passer à la solution radicale de ré-installer Windows et tous les logiciels. Ce qui peut prendre plusieurs jours (ce qui occupera mes journées de retraité oisif ).

Joseph