Resolving Performance Issues on Large Mastery Reports

Recently, many popular browsers including Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera have taken steps to remove, reduce, and cripple support for the Adobe Flash plugin and any web applications that rely on it.  Since JumpRope was originally written, pieces of our application (including the Teacher Dashboard and Backoffice reporting) have relied on Adobe Flash.

Since the trend toward mobile devices and related announcements from Apple, Google, and others about changes to browsers, we have been working hard to remove our dependency on Adobe Flash in order to provide better performance and support for more devices.  Some of the steps taken over the last few years include:

1. Re-writing our Student & Parent Portal (now called the Family Portal) to work without Flash and to work across phones, tablets, and PCs.  Let us know if you'd like to upgrade!
2. Designing new components in our application (such as the Standards Bank manager, Curriculum Design tool, Data Admin, and others) to work outside of the Adobe Flash interface.
3. Taking aggressive steps to move critical application logic and settings from the Adobe Flash-based interface towards an API-based server platform in preparation for redesigning our Teacher Dashboard and Backoffice.

Many of these initiatives have gone very well, but some of them are in the background and not noticed if you're typically interacting with the Teacher Dashboard and the Backoffice.  As very complex pieces of our online software, the required re-write is taking time to ensure our planned replacements are reliable, polished, and don't introduce a significant training burden on our customers.  As browsers continue to introduce barriers to using plugin-based web applications, we are working as quickly as possible to make sure we have solutions and workarounds available for any features that are especially slow or troublesome.  We appreciate your patience as we undertake this significant project - we plan to have some exciting related announcements over the coming months.

For those relying on running large mastery-based reports in the Backoffice that are experiencing trouble, you may want to consider this workaround that bypasses browser-based limitations to allow JumpRope to run at full speed.

For Windows, download this ZIP file, extract it to your desktop (or other desired folder) and run the EXE file. 

For Macintosh, download this DMG file, open it, and drag the JumpRope.app into your Applications folder and start the JumpRope application.

In either case, you should experience a substantially faster version of JumpRope (not crippled by the web browser) that can reliably load reports.  You can also provide the details of the report to our Support team and we'll send along the results after running the report.