Hot Potatoes and Canvas Instructure Integration

[B.D. Fox]

Howdy folks!

I am a graduate teaching assistant at a university in Canada, and I have been given the task of doing some significant course development work with some Hot Potatoes modules. The instructor for this course initially wanted me to try and find a replacement for HP because, from their somewhat-technophobic-not-Linux understanding, HP is not compatible with newer computers. However, I am wondering quite a bit of the following:

1) Has anyone in this forum worked with Hot Potatoes as part of a Canvas Instructure course?

2) If so, have y'all managed to find ways to house HP within Canvas itself, rather than relying on weblinks to servers?

3) Is there anything similar in functions to Hot Potatoes that y'all could recommend by chance?

I am personally really curious about using HP and seeing if there's a way to "update" it for a Windows 11 use-case, and also have been passively curious about using Linux, so I may cave and get Linux just to play around a bit. I'm also waiting to hear back from the previous TA who worked with Hot Potatoes in this course to see what they did to get it working enough for last year, but I sadly know the course instructor just wants to move away from HP (but will miss it dearly).

Thanks!

[Agnès S.]

Hi,
I'm sorry, I didn't see your message.
I'm not familiar with Canvas Instructure, so I can't help you with that.

> HP is not compatible with newer computers

I'm surprised. HP works well with Windows 11 and does not require Linux.
However, it can be used with Linux (as I do) via Wine.
The concept behind Hot Potatoes is very simple: you create an htm file
using one of the modules provided (which works with Windows or Linux).
The htm file can be read by any browser and does not depend on the
operating system.

Cheers.
Agnès S.

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[Martin Holmes]

Hi there,

Hot Potatoes was originally written in the 1990s, and although I've released updated versions in the last few years, it's still built with older tools, using a virtual machine built from the last Windows computer I owned many years ago. It does work just fine on all versions of Windows, but neither the installer nor the executables are signed with an MS-approved code-signing certificate, so Windows will probably complain when you try to install it, and it will probably be blocked any enterprise-managed Windows computer. Since we stopped selling licenses for it in 2009, and the company Half-Baked Software no longer exists, there's no revenue or funding to cover the expense of setting up as a Windows developer, and in any case I only use Linux myself these days, so I'm not keen to get into interacting with Windows any more, since everything just works on Linux, and I'd rather gently encourage people to switch away from Windows if I can.

However, if you are an administrator on your own Windows computer, you can certainly install and use it on Windows 11. If your computer is subject to the hegemony of a centralized enterprise systems administration group, you might try to make the case for allowing it to be installed, but I have no idea how successful that would be. At my unit at UVic we just run it on Linux using Wine.  

As I have mentioned, there are many aspects to the approach we took when writing Hot Potatoes that I still believe to be good choices, and I do have a very long-term plan to create an open-source browser-hosted version which could be run on any web server to generate exercises in much the same way as the Hot Potatoes applications work now; that would require no permissions or code-signing. However, that is a very long-term plan.

Cheers,
Martin

[B.D. Fox]

Hi Martin and Agnes!

I'll double-check what it's like running it on my own machine (which is a personally-owned Windows 11) and double-check with the other instructor to see if their device is an enterprise-based device with ickiness on its usage. I've also reached out to my university's learning tech team to see what recommendations they have, and also to see if they can push for HP to be adopted by our university as an allowable software. We're geographically quite close to UVic (which I suspect is how the instructor I'm working with first found out about it), but given all of the notices on both the HP website, your personal website, and the documentation for HP7, I haven't reached out to UVic about HP (though it is helpful/useful to know that it's run on Linux via Wine there). On a semi-separate note, do you struggle with having faculty that refuse to use Linux in order to run/manage HP for their courses, and thus they don't run HP at all in their courses?

If this is too negging/prying that was trying to be avoided by telling people to not send emails with tech support, I totally understand!

BD

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[Martin Holmes]

Hi BD,

Not too prying at all -- I'm happy to respond. To be honest, I suspect we (the Humanities Computing and Media Centre) are the only people on the UVic campus that I know of who are using Hot Potatoes; the university switched to BrightSpace for course materials during the pandemic. We mostly use it for maintaining and updating older language-teaching sites that were created years ago but are still in use; we don't develop new teaching materials much any more. In our unit, we have four developer workstations and 14 lab machines used by research assistants working on projects, and all of those are Linux except for one lab machine and one developer machine (used by our designer). Lots of people use Linux for the first time when they come to our lab, but it never seems to bother them. 

I've never proselytized or pushed much for the use of Hot Potatoes within our own institution, since it was originally commercial (although part-owned by the university), but also because we feared that the technical support load from people who could just pick up the phone and call, or walk into the office, might end up being more than we could easily deal with. There was also (in Canada particularly) a sort of anti-invented-here vibe -- how good can it be, it's just those two scruffy guys down the hall who wrote it -- that meant that Hot Potatoes was much more widely used and appreciated outside of Canada. 

Which institution are you working at? (If that's not too nosy.)

Cheers,

Martin

[Martin Holmes]

I should say: the non-Linux machines in our lab are Macs. No Windows machines at all.

[B.D. Fox]

Hi Martin!

I'm at a university in the Lower Mainland of BC, but don't want to "publicly" dox myself too heavily beyond that, if it's okay for me to privately respond I can do so. One of the lecturers in our earth sciences department has been using HP for a course for the past couple years and was quite disappointed that it was starting to deprecate with the forward march of time and technology, particularly because they are not as tech-adept currently. Our institution has provided some tech they've soft-launched for a bit, (H5P) that we're currently looking into using right now, the main issue is about whether or not the course materials would be automatically publicly accessible/usable.

That does make sense about how it's been used at UVic, and also hesitancy to get overwhelmed by All The Faculty coming to seek support for it, haha!

BD

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