Session timeout warning for Original Course View
Blackboard Learn SaaS, Managed Hosting, Self-Hosted
Ultra Experience, Original Experience
Original Course View
Impact: All users
When a user is idle for over three hours the session ends. A user must login again to continue to use Learn. If a user saves a page or selects a button, the session refreshes and stays active for three more hours. There can be times a user is working but considered idle.
This happens because the browser is not sending data to Learn. Some examples are when a user is:
- authoring a Discussion Board post,
- authoring an Assignment submission in the text editor in Learn, or
- creating a Content Item.
With this release, users whose session is ending soon will receive a warning. This warning will appear at least six minutes before the session times out. If the user closes the warning before the session ends, the session will extend for three more hours. This is the primary scenario for this improvement. The goal is to help users who have been authoring for an exceptionally long time not to lose their work.
A user away from the computer for an extended time will receive the warning. Yet the user will not be able to extend their session. When the user closes the warning, they will return to the current page instead of returning to the login page. This allows the user to copy anything authored before it is lost. A user in this situation will redirect to the login page when they select any link or button on the page.
Image 1. Session Expiring Soon warning
With this release, for a user who was away from their computer for a long time it will be unclear when the warning appeared. Thus, the user will not know if the session renewed or not. We are considering future improvements for session timeout behavior. This release focuses on helping users who have been idle to the server but engaged in authoring content. The goal is to help these users not lose authored content.
For administrators: The user warning will appear at least six minutes before the session ends. Users may have more than six minutes to extend their session because the session cleanup process is a grouped background task.
The most common setting for session duration is three hours. Some institutions have configured other durations. This feature will work with these other configurations, and always give users at least six minutes to extend their sessions.
We are planning to make similar improvements to the Ultra Course View.