[ARCHIVED] New Assignment Student View Breaks MathJax

[thorine]

The  new student view of assignments with online file submission does not render MathJax. This does not occur when the submission type is paper, as the new view (which is hard to see in my screen shot) does not activate in those cases.

I checked the HTML, and the MathJax tag is still present in the loaded page, but it is not activated. This occurs in Chrome, Firefox, and Edge browsers. I have submitted this problem to my IT department, and they have forwarded it to the vendor (presumably Canvas), but I have heard nothing back. I see no mention of this when searching for "MathJax" in "Current Issues". 

Is there any other place where this can be brought to the developers' attention?

[erinhmcmillan]

Hello, your institution should have a method for submitting bug tickets to Canvas, either through your institution's IT department or via Canvas support. Submitting a ticket would be the best way to help get this triaged.

Thanks!

Erin

[thorine]

I thought I replied to this earlier today, but I might have exited before posting. Anyhow, to clarify, I did submit this as an issue through my IT department sometime before Christmas. Not having heard anything about it, or see it mentioned in Current Issues, etc., is what was causing my concern (although at the same time holding out hope that the new MathJax rollout would resolve the issue).

[erinhmcmillan]

Hi, your institution may not have escalated the case to our support team yet. Can you reply to the case and see the status?
Thanks,
Erin

[thorine]

Thanks for the reply.

The last I had heard was that "they" thought it should be resolved by the Feb 20 update. I put "they" in quotes, because in the wording it wasn't clear whether this was our campus's IT or Canvas's support team saying that. (The latter I would trust on the issue, but I didn't think the former would have the position to make such a determination.)

Anyhow, the semi-good news is that this issue was fixed with the Feb 20 update... at least through Monday. 😞

However, now, it looks like my campus rolled this update back.(?) Students are saying today (Wed 24) that it is broken again (and I can confirm that). Also, MathJax is back to not working in page titles, etc. (The latter is not a big issue to me, but I made a few test things Saturday to try it out, and they are now not working.)

I am in the process of asking our IT what is going on (by replying the to case email thread I already have). 

Although I fear it might be just an internal identifier, this is the subject line, in case that gives you any info

[MC] Canvas Help Form / Assignments ( Cc 07087389 ) ISSUE=2189016 PROJ=36

But... hopefully, all is "done" on Canvas's end, as the update seemed to work. I just have to figure out what is going on with our local system. 😞

[erinhmcmillan]

I'm glad to hear your institution's support case system sounds to be doing well! Yes, our engineers are working on a few things. They're the ones to roll this back, not your institution. So yes, as soon as our team gets this figured out you should be good to go in assignment enhancements as well.
Erin

[thorine]

Oh! I understand now. I was wondering why we would have rolled an update back. It makes more sense that it was done on your end. Thanks for the info.

[phillip_mills]

@erinhmcmillan Thanks for sharing this information. Now that we know that it's been rolled back, can you tell me how that information is communicated to users? I realise that you're doing your best, but this feature has now been rolled back twice and  the inline/block formatting is critical for content delivey, as it can't fall back to the previous rendering system like equations entered using the math editor.

[erinhmcmillan · Accepted solution]

@phillip_mills I pass on what comes from our product and engineering teams. The main behavior related to the problem was in Classic Quizzes related to question banks. They're feeling more confident that has been resolved but want to do some more checking. They have one more item they'd like to fix in the production environment and then we will most likely turn it back on. 

The official word will come from the product team, mostly on Monday. 

Thanks,

Erin

[erinhmcmillan]

We've posted an update in the release notes: Canvas Release Notes (2021-02-20) - Canvas Community

Thanks,

Erin

[phillip_mills]

Thanks very much for the updates @erinhmcmillan. FYI I wasn't thinking that you were personally responsible for giving us updates on feature rollbacks. It would, for example, be good if this was communicated somewhere like the Canvas Service Status page. Whilst this wasn't a down server it was a feature that was on and then off, so it could be regarded as something that was. I'll get a colleague of mine to pass that feedback on to our account rep. Thanks again for your help and hope you've had a wonderful weekend.

[thorine]

Are we any closer to turning this back on?

I can appreciate that, when adding a new feature, they want to make sure it does not break any existing features. However, there are two issues with this.

1. This new feature (MathJax everywhere) is also serving to fix a pre-existing bug. If it cannot be deployed, then the existing bug needs to be fixed on its own.
2. If the bug cannot be fixed on its own, then the previous new feature, the new view of student assignments with online submission (introduced December 2020), should be rolled back, since it is causing the bug (by breaking MathJax).

This is going on three months that students cannot see MathJax on their online submission assignments. Printing the page to a PDF and attaching that file is a clunky solution that negates the accessibility features of MathJax. Creating a separate page (not assignment) with MathJax containing the questions is just bad from a design point of view.

[thorine]

The worry I had about having what was a bug fixed by a "new feature" rather than fixing the original bug independently of the new feature, was that the new feature could have its own issues that delayed this fix, or if the new feature is removed (for whatever other reason), the bug is re-introduced. That is what has happened here.

I realize the team has to prioritize things, but I think it would make better design sense to fix the issue with [new student view of online-submission assignment not reacting to/loading a MathJax tag] separate from adding the feature [MathJax enabled without need for tags, almost everywhere]. 

But, again, I get that sometimes those choices have to be made.

[thorine]

The MathJax Everywhere feature seems to be turned back on now for good. Since that fixes the issue, I marked this as solved. Thanks for the feedback.