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WeBWork + Blackboard: multiple Blackboard course issue

WeBWork + Blackboard: multiple Blackboard course issue

by Wesley Burr -
Number of replies: 7
Hoping someone has seen this before, and might have a suggestion. We implemented LTI connecting WW and Blackboard, and it seemed to work well in all our testing. Users from my Blackboard course successfully login, and are assigned to all visible problem sets. Specifically, we setup a link on my Blackboard that points students straight to the first assignment, and it takes them into the assignment interface no problem.

However, we're running two sections of the course. The Blackboard IT guy says that he setup LTI to be a global tool link, so it should work from other 'courses' inside Blackboard, so we just copied the same LTI tool link over to the second section of the course. Students get directed fine, appear to be logged in directly ok (and show up in the Course List), but cannot access the assignment.

Universally, they receive the following error. They can click around in the WW interface, and go to the general Homework Sets spot, but cannot click on the first assignment - it shows up, it's assigned to them, but it's not clickable.

The selected problem set (2019FA-Assign01) is not a valid set for [USER_NAME]:

Any thoughts? I'm at the point where I'm going to have one or two of these students come into my office and do it on a) another system (mine); and b) with the debug parameters enabled briefly, so I can try to see what's going on. We're in production now, though, so I don't want to mess with too much as we have hundreds of students successfully using the system.
In reply to Wesley Burr

Re: WeBWork + Blackboard: multiple Blackboard course issue

by Michael Gage -
It might be worthwhile to just set up the link in the second course directly. Is the "this is an LTI tool" checkbox clicked in both cases?

Look in the upper right hand corner to see what login blackboard has used to sign in the student -- is it what you are expecting in both courses? sometimes blackboard makes up aliases for students to preserve privacy. It should match the USER_NAME that the homework sets have been created for.

Good luck.


In reply to Wesley Burr

Re: WeBWork + Blackboard: multiple Blackboard course issue

by Danny Glin -
It sounds like the LTI part of things is working, as you wouldn't get any messages about homework sets if the login was unsuccessful.

It sounds like the student is being logged in (you can verify this in the ClassList Editor), but is being prevented from seeing the assignment. A couple of reasons this might happen:
  • The set is not assigned to the user. This shouldn't happen unless the set was created after the first time the student logged in. In that case, you would need to make sure that the set is assigned to all users.
  • There is no set with that name in the course. If you are using the same WeBWorK course for both Blackboard courses, then this should not be an issue.
  • The set is hidden from students.
  • It is before the open date for the set.
In reply to Danny Glin

Re: WeBWork + Blackboard: multiple Blackboard course issue

by Wesley Burr -
Update: none of the above applied. It appears that the issue was LTI grade passback?

Course 1: had the LTI link, had passback turned on.
Course 2: had the LTI link, had the grading bit turned _off_.

I added the grading option, then when the students logged in the next time, it worked fine. No muss, no fuss.

So the error message was fairly unintuitive, I guess - I had assumed that it didn't matter if the grading passback option was on or off, but I guess it does?

Thanks for your suggestions! If I figure out anything more, I'll add it to the LTI wiki entry.
In reply to Wesley Burr

Re: WeBWork + Blackboard: multiple Blackboard course issue

by Danny Glin -
Now that you mention it, I believe this was a design choice with the LTI links. If you have set-level grade passback turned on, WeBWorK only allows access to the homework set from a link to which it can pass back grades. IIRC in cases like this WeBWorK checks to make sure that the LMS includes a grade passback URL in order to ensure that grades don't get out of sync.

Also, the "not a valid set" error is supposed to be followed by a second line with details as to why it is not a valid set. Was there anything past the colon in that error message?
In reply to Wesley Burr

Re: WeBWork + Blackboard: multiple Blackboard course issue

by Nathan Wallach -
If
$LTIGradeMode = "homework"
is set at either the WW system level or the course level, a user cannot open an assignment from the list of assignments, and only access it via a link directly to the assignment. That is to force the LTI connection to provide the necessary grade passback URL needed to return grades. Without the return link grades could not get passed back. As a result, Geoff blocked access to the assignments in any other manner when grade-passback is enabled on the WW side.

If I recall the line where an assignment link would usually appears says that you need to connect directly from the Learning Management system.
In reply to Nathan Wallach

Re: WeBWork + Blackboard: multiple Blackboard course issue

by Wesley Burr -
That is indeed what the error message is coming to.

This does keep coming up: every time I post a new assignment, I get 5-15 students from the class reporting they can't get access to the new assignment, and it's always the same error message.

They *claim* they are clicking on the link in Blackboard, but that it takes them directly to this error. Here's what they all look like:

The selected problem set (2019FA-Assign05) is not a valid set for USERNAMAE:

You must use your Learning Management System (E.G. Blackboard, Moodle, Canvas, etc...) to access this set. Try logging in to the Learning Management System and visiting the set from there.

So is the theory that each time, they're not using the Blackboard link? Because they all CLAIM, swear up and down on a stack of Bibles, that they're just doing the usual thing. But then none of them will come to my office to demonstrate, so I'm basing this on their word ...
In reply to Wesley Burr

Re: WeBWork + Blackboard: multiple Blackboard course issue

by Danny Glin -
It's hard to say without a verifiable test, but there are a couple of things that could be at play:
  1. If students were used to using WeBWorK before the LTI link, they may be used to navigating between assignments within WeBWorK, which could be at play. I don't have a system with LTI grade pass back enabled to play with, but I vaguely recall the links to LTI-linked assignments being greyed out for students on the main assignments page. Can someone verify if this is the case?
  2. If for some reason Blackboard is not setting the grade pass back URL properly for these students, then they would see this same behaviour.
I don't see a good resolution to this until we're able to corroborate whether this is a system issue or a student issue.