ARCHIVED: Can I lose my work in Oncourse if my session times out?

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Important:

Oncourse is retired. For details, see ARCHIVED: About the Oncourse retirement.

For most tasks, Oncourse has no autosave feature. You can lose your work in Oncourse in some situations, especially when you're typing in a text box or field. Therefore, UITS recommends saving your work often. See below for details.

About the timeout period

The Oncourse server disconnects your session after two hours of perceived inactivity. In addition, unexpected network connectivity problems can sometimes occur, particularly if you are connecting wirelessly. If you're composing text or otherwise working in the application when the disconnect occurs, you will lose your work and be unable to retrieve it.

Note: Oncourse will warn you when your session is close to timing out. Click OK in the "Timeout warning" box to reset the timer.

The session timer begins from the last time you did one of the following:

Selected a tool from the menubar
Selected a tab for a site
Clicked a button such as Save, Save as Draft, Post, Send, Next, etc. (in most cases)
Clicked OK when the timeout warning pops up on the screen

Composing text, or clicking radio buttons or drop-down lists to select options, will not reset the timer.

Note: While you're taking an assessment in Tests & Surveys, the timeout does not apply, and Oncourse automatically saves your work every 15 minutes.

How to save your work

Many tools have the option to save your item as a draft; when taking assessments in Tests & Surveys, you can click Save at the bottom of the page at any time. (For more, see ARCHIVED: Taking an assessment.) Check the appropriate documentation for the tool you're working in for differences between your specific options (e.g., Save vs. Save as Draft).

Note: To prevent losing work, you may prefer to compose long pieces of text outside of Oncourse, where possible, and paste the text into the appropriate fields in Oncourse. If you experience formatting problems when using Microsoft Word, see ARCHIVED: Pasting from Microsoft Word.