Exercise Viewing Options

When you have uploaded an exercise using your authoring program, the program offers you the option to view it immediately, by going straight to the exercise URL. Choose this option to check that the exercise has been uploaded correctly, and works properly.

Once an exercise has been uploaded, there are three possible ways in which it can be Viewed:

1. by anyone, without the results being stored on hotpotatoes.net
2. by the teacher, without the results being stored on hotpotatoes.net
3. by the student, with the exercise result being stored on the hotpotatoes.net server when the student completes the exercise.

1: Public Viewing

This is what you see when you choose to view the exercise immediately after uploading it. Exercises are viewed publicly by typing the exercise URL into your browser. As the teacher, you can also email the URL to anyone you like, and if they click on this URL in their email program, the exercise should appear in their browser.

Uploading an exercise to the hotpotatoes.net does not automatically enable anyone to view it. The exercise page is not indexed or linked from any other web page, and it is virtually impossible to guess the URL of a page on hotpotatoes.net. Even if you do not password-protect your exercises, they are likely to be seen only by the people who are told the exercise URL by you.

But if you need to, you can also password-protect the exercise using the option provided in your authoring program at upload time. When you upload an exercise, you have to select the Class in which it will be used, and each Class has a Viewing Password. See Classes for more information.

Please note that password-protection is not available for all hotpotatoes.net hosting accounts - if you are using the Hot Potatoes program with a free educational licence, and you have not purchased a commercial hotpotatoes.net hosting product, you are not allowed to password-protect Hot Potatoes exercises in this way. For details of Hot Potatoes licensing arrangements, please contact us.

2: Viewing by the Teacher

The teacher can of course view the exercise via the public viewing system above, but for extra convenience, we have provided a direct link to the exercises from the Exercises page in the Management area. To access the exercises in this way, log into hotpotatoes.net via the Home Page, and on your Account Management page, click the Exercises link. You can then click on any of the exercise titles listed to view that exercise.

3: Viewing by Students, and Storing the Results

When a student logs in via the Home Page, they see a list of the exercises available in the class (or classes) of which they are a member. When they click on the title of an exercise, the exercise is displayed in their browser. So far this is similar to how exercises are displayed in 1 and 2 above, but the big difference for students lies in what happens when the exercise is finished.

At completion, instead of just finishing and reporting a mark, the results of the exercise are automatically sent to the Hotpotatoes.Net server, where they are stored in the results database. The student is also offered the option to add their own comments on the exercise, which are stored with the result.

When an exercise is accessed via a student login in this way, the results are stored whenever an exercise is completed, so it is quite possible for a student to complete an exercise several times - but the teacher will be able to see this, and to see the different scores achieved each time.

For more details about the Results system, please see the Viewing Results page.