Publishing Attempt Handling

When the underlying page or activity has a new publication deployed by an author, Torus handles existing resource and activity attempts in different ways depending on the attempt state.

Documentation on attempts and their state can be found in Attempt Design.

Ungraded Pages

Here is how updates to content are applied to attempts in ungraded pages:

• Finalized: Finalized attempts are affected in no way by new revision publication.
  These attempts always maintain a reference to the revision of the page or the activity that existed at the time of finalization. If a student "Resets" a finalized attempt to create another attempt, this new attempt will always show the content of the latest published revision.

• Open and active: Open and active activity attempts are left as-is by the system. In this manner, a student that is in the middle of interacting with a page that contains activities will not have this content updated by new revision publication.

• Open and inactive: Inactive attempts revision references remain unchanged by new revision publication. It is only at the time that a student revisits a page that has an inactive attempt (thus "restoring" that attempt and making it "active") where Torus will detect that a new revision of the page or activity is available. There are two cases to consider here:

  1. The page itself has a new revision available. In this case, Torus simply creates a new page attempt record with all new activity attempt records for the student. The reasoning here is that since actual page content itself has changed the sy
  2. Only activity revisions have changed. In this case, a new activity attempt will be created for the changed activities. No new page attempt is created.

• Non existent: For pages that a student has never visited, there is of course no attempt hierarchy present. At the time of first visit, the student will always encounter the latest published revision for the page and activities.

Here are some example student usage and author publishing scenarios:

Example 1:

1. Student visits an ungraded page that contains one activity (at revision A). This puts the page and activity attempt records into an "open and active" state.
2. As the student reads the page, the author makes a change to only the activity and publishes the activity. The publication of this new activity revision (revision B) does not change what the student sees.
3. The student requests a hint for the activity. This hint is retrieved from revision A of the activity.
4. The student submits the activity for evaluation. The server evaluates their response according to the state of the activity at revision A, and finalizes the activity attepmt record.
5. The student then clicks "Reset" to try the activity again. This system displays the content of the activity at revision B to the student, and creats a new activity attempt record in an "open and active" state.

Example 2:

1. Student visits an ungraded page (at revision A) that contains one activity. This puts the page and activity attempt records into an "open and active" state.
2. The student selects a answer for the activity, but does not click "Submit", and then navigates away from the page. This conceptually puts the page and activity attempt records into "open and inactive" states.
3. The author then publishes a change to only the content of the page, not the activity.
4. When the student revisits the page, the system detects that the page attempt references a revision that is no longer the latest revision. The system creates a new page attempt and new activity attempt for the student, thus allowing them to see the new content of the page.

Graded Pages

• Finalized: Finalized attempts for graded pages are affected in no way by new revision publication.
  Similar to ungraded page attempts, these attempts always maintain a reference to the revision of the page or the activity that existed at the time of finalization.
• Open and active: Open and active activity attempts are left as-is by the system. In this manner, a student that is in the middle of interacting with a graded page will not have the content that they see updated by new revision publication.
• Open and inactive: Inactive attempts revision references remain unchanged by new revision publication. When a student resumes the attempt, the system allows them to continue with the original content. This is the opposite of how ungraded pages are handled. After the student submits the entire assessment for evaluation, subsequent attempts will show the newly published content.
• Non existent: For graded pages that a student has never visited, there is of course no attempt hierarchy present. At the time of first visit, the student will always encounter the latest published revision for the page and activities.