In the days of Gmail, when you can't got three seconds without your email draft being saved, how hard can it be to have Learning Suite save your work as you go?

Even if that is for some reason too complicated, couldn't we at least add a save button? I've had Learning Suite lose my work 4 times now when I click submit. Do you know how frustrating that is on a short answer quiz? It is possibly the most demoralizing feeling one could have, next to the emotions I felt when waking up this morning and seeing the ground covered in snow.

Today, I filled out a questionnaire about one of my classes, giving my honest and thoughtful feedback. When I clicked submit, Learning Suite deleted all of my work, and I had very little time left (it was a timed exam), not to mention the feeling of indifference after my work was deleted (whose to say that wouldn't happen again?), so for all of the questions I submitted, "Learning Suite ate my responses, and I don't have the time or energy to redo this quiz." How is my professor going to feel when he could have gotten some honest, helpful feedback about his class, and instead it's Learning Suite's fault that he is deprived of that? What if that happens to everyone? Then he'll have wasted our time, as well as his. Even worse is when this happens on exams that affect our grades. It causes frustration from the students and professors, not to mention much wasted time. This problem needs to be fixed.

Where is the save button? Can we please get that added? Or better yet, pull a Gmail and auto save your work? I know I'm not the only one that has lost their work due to this issue.

Frequently I run into issues with knowing (a) which of my quizzes/exams are open-book and (b) what exactly that means! On rare occasions, faculty will include this in the directions for a given exam (instructions that appear before you have opened the exam) but frequently it either is unstated altogether or has to be dug up in the syllabus. It could be worth considering adding default Boolean values for a few common exam 'markers' that could also have an associated description for times when there might be further confusion (the title of this item suggests a few). Easy-to-scan icons could then be added to the exam descriptions that could be clicked/hovered to display clarifying details when available.

In addition, this could encourage a structure for better capturing and displaying exam metadata/instructions to students in an easy-to-consume fashion and be applied easily to testing center or online tests concerning time limits, available devices, available resources (books, notes, internet, classmates), whether a test can be saved and reopened (currently readable, but easy to miss), etc. This opening exam screen has the potential to have much richer information than it currently has, most of which could be captured through a series of controls during the process of a faculty member creating an examination (examples could include simply checking check boxes for what kinds of 'open' a test has with accompanying text fields for each box if clarification seems warranted or, on the student side of things, more visually representing time limits, ability to exit/save, etc.). I think there's good potential here to create a much richer testing environment that could reduce student stress/confusion and some (potentially) redundant student-faculty interactions to relay the same pieces of information that could instead be captured and crystallized.