University of Wisconsin Platteville
Distance Learning Newsletter
plexus

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

Technical Tips for Online Course Students
Browser Version Requirements

by Steve Christensen, Information Processing Consultant
Distance Learning Center
UW-Platteville

Internet browsers are made by a number of companies. Each company has different people who create these browsers, and each of these people approach developing the software differently.  Because of the various approaches to writing the software, we have differences in the way things look and react in browsers such as Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. 

Our online courses are developed to be used with specific browsers.  We test courses on an ongoing basis on different machines and browsers, as well as browser versions.  It is, however, impossible to cover every possible combination because there are literally millions of possibilities.  This means that, although we provide specific browser requirements for our online courses, you may access them with browsers that are not on our requirements list.  We base our requirements on a large number of tests and recommend the least problematic software with a number of systems.

It is to your advantage to meet these requirements to save yourself a lot of headaches once you are actively working in your online courses.  You will be satisfied with your online course experience if problems are kept to a minimum.


 
Online Courses Q & A
Q Why does nothing happen when I click on a discussion in my course?
A Security restrictions in the courses are directly connected to your login ID.  If you click on a discussion that appears to be available but nothing happens, you may not have access to that particular discussion. 

For security reasons, some discussions may be restricted because it is a private discussion area for a student.  In other cases, your course may require "teams." If this is the case, you may have access to discussions related to your team, but you may be restricted or "locked out" of other team's discussions. Restrictions are based on the way the course has been structured. 

You should be able to distinguish what discussions you have access to by reading the title of the discussion.  If you have this problem with a discussion that you know that you should have access to, you should contact the help line at 877-724-7883 as soon as possible.


 
Watch the next issue for more tips on online courses and your computer.

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Date created: October 31, 2000.
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