Category: Technical

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Safe Exam Browser

Because Rogo doesn’t itself come with a secure browser it prompted us to look for something third-party. A helpful pointer from Farzana Khandia from Loughborough on the very helpful QUESTIONMARK@JISCMAIL.AC.UK list, led us to Safe Exam Browser (SEB). This is a fantastic bit of free software which has a number of advantages over QuestionMark Secure (QMS), including:

  1. Once installed by an administrator, SEB uses a Windows service to prevent access to the Task Manager, Alt-Tab, etc. This means a typical computing lab ‘user’ will be able to run it with no further work. In contrast, QMS requires that typical user to be given read/write permissions on a number of registry keys – a fiddly process and one which upsets many IT officers.
  2. SEB is launched from a desktop shortcut and then calls the assessment server (or other system specified in an ini file before installation). It then carries on running until an IT officer closes it down. QMS starts and stops when a secure assessment is opened and submitted respectively. This leaves the machine unsecured once a participant has submitted.
  3. SEB allows administrators to allow access to ‘Permitted Applications’  such as  the system calculator and Notepad – this is not possible in the version of QMS that we are using.

The only disadvantages over QMS that we have discovered so far are:

  1. The requirement to enter a key sequence to close down the SEB slightly increases the time required to reset computers between sittings of students.
  2. If the machine crashes or is switched off while SEB is running, a bat file needs to be run to re-enable the functions disabled by SEB i.e it only re-enables them itself when it is closed normally.

We’re now considering whether we could use SEB instead of QMS, even with Perception-delivered assessments as it would save us the extra annual subscription for support on that proportion of our licence.

 

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CSS – Start values in ordered list

When trying to specify the start value for an ordered list, i.e. to make it start from 4 rather 0, I found that the “start” attribute, e.g. <ol start=4>, had been deprecated in HTML 4 and that it should be done using CSS. However, the CSS is more complicated than it seems it should be for what is a relatively straightforward task. It also seems strange that it should be part of CSS, as the start value is not really a style consideration.

Thankfully, in the HTML5 specification – http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-html5-20080122/#the-ol – the start attribute is no longer deprecated. The same is true of the value attribute for li elements, allowing you to specify the value for a specific list item. So to start a list at 4 and miss out 6 & 7, you would use:

<ol start="4">
   <li>Item 4</li>
   <li>Item 5</li>
   <li value="8">Item 8</li>
   <li>Item 9</li>
</ol>

This gives:

  1. Item 4
  2. Item 5
  3. Item 8
  4. Item 9
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CSS – display: inline-block in IE7

I was having some problems with getting the layout of the buttons for the JQuery Tools Scrollable Navigator plugin to work in IE7 for CSlide, e.g. https://learntech.imsu.ox.ac.uk/cslide/collections/index/87.

After a bit of searching I found this: http://fourwhitefeet.com/2009/02/css-display-inline-block-in-ie7/, so thanks to Cathy at http://fourwhitefeet.com.

It turns out that, in IE7, display: inline-block only works on inline elements, and I was trying to use it on divs. The trick is to wrap the content of these elements in an element that is natively displayed inline, e.g. span. For my purpose, I could just replace my divs with spans (they probably shouldn”t have been divs in the first place, but I’d mutilated the examples for Scrollable to gte where I was). It should also work by just adding spans around the content that you want to be ‘inline-block’, but inside the ‘block’ element, e.g.

<div><span style="display: inline-block">My Content</span></div>