report editor (instructor view) doesn't show reports

[gweinberg]

On the current version of the report editor (e.g., any of the project 2's from 36-200 Spring 2021), from Instructor view (on Win10, Firefox 88.0.1), there are bugs in the report editor as follows:

1. When I first tried about 25 minutes ago going to a lesson on which students have worked on the report, and clicked Report, it wasn't even rendering a blank document, it was just showing a collapsed frame, something like the following:

2. I don't seem to be able to duplicate that first bug, but now when I go to any of the project 2's and click report -> then select a student's to display from the bottom menu, it seems to flash for a second but then it doesn't render, I just get a blank report:

I've confirmed this on several different project 2's so far.

3. About 25 minutes ago, on any of these explorers, when bug number 1 was happening, and then if I tried open html, that rendered blank on the screen. but now an uploaded html project seems to render correctly.

[Edited to add: These bugs don't happen on the 36-200 project 1's]

[Planeshifter]

Will need to investigate 1., which did occur for me once in the past but was quickly resolved through reloading the page.

As for 2., I am not convinced there is an error here. Has the respective student worked on that project? Could you please point me to a student for whom we have a submitted report but whose report on ISLE is empty?

When I pulled up a handful of students in the report editor corresponding to the project they worked on as judged from the submissions on ISLE, they all showed up. Currently, a student who just opened the lesson once will appear in the dropdown menu with an empty report. Since students presumably open all the different explorers to decide on which to work on, it's expected that there will be lots of empty reports. Going forward, maybe it would be preferable to somehow filter out or visually differentiate empty reports from the ones that were actively worked on. I will look into what we can do with regards to that.

[gweinberg]

Ok maybe that's the problem. So, currently the report editor generates a blank report for a student even if they just open the lesson and, say, look at the data but never even tab to Report? Seems like it should only generate and log a report if they enter a character on the report editor.

From an instructor standpoint, it might be more useful to view reports by student, rather than students by data explorer. I.e., to be able to go to a list of the students, click on a name, and then get a report editor with a selector at the bottom where it shows all the different editors (maybe for a given project) that the indicated student has typed something in. That would, I think, be more useful not only if we need to quickly pull up a report by a given student, but also to track a given student's progress.

[Planeshifter]

Update on this issue: With the next update, IDs associated with blank reports will not show up anymore in the dropdown list.

Leaving the issue open due to the other suggested improvements including a way to browse all text documents that have been worked on in a course and not just on a per-lesson basis.