My quiz says the questions didn't load
You've added a knowledge check, you open the lesson to admire it, and where the questions should be there is a line of text saying they aren't shown - or, on pages published a while ago, "The questions didn't load - check your connection and try again."
Your quiz is fine. You are looking at the one place a quiz cannot run.
Why a preview can't show a quiz
A quiz is not part of the page the way your words and pictures are. The page arrives empty and the questions are sent separately, once, to a particular signed-in learner. That is deliberate, and it is what stops the questions and the correct answers being readable by anyone who thinks to look at the page.
A preview has nobody signed in. There is no learner to send the questions to, so they are not sent, and the page says so. Nothing has gone wrong - you have watched the safety mechanism work.
How to actually check it
Become a student on your own course. It takes a couple of minutes:
- Set the course so it isn't publicly on sale while you work (Charge once, or sell a year of access covers the settings).
- Publish it. A sign-in link cannot open a course that hasn't been published.
- Enrol your own email address.
- Open the course from the welcome email that arrives.
You are now looking at your course exactly as a student does, and you can sit the quiz, get it wrong on purpose, and see what they see when they do (Who marks my quizzes?).
If an assistant tells you your quizzes are broken
This is worth knowing, because it has happened. An AI assistant checking your course by taking screenshots of previews sees the same empty quiz on every single lesson it looks at, and concludes - reasonably, from what it can see - that every quiz on your site has failed and your students are stuck.
It is looking at previews. Ask it to check whether anyone has actually completed a quiz on your course before you believe it. If students have been finishing them, they are working, whatever the preview shows.
When it is real
If a signed-in student on your published course tells you the questions won't load, that is a genuine fault and not this. Tell us, with the course and lesson name, and we'll look.
The prompt
“Is my quiz on [course name] actually working, or does it only look broken in the preview?”
Press Copy, then paste it into your AI and fill in the [bracketed] parts. First time? Connect your AI to bernard first - a one-time setup in bernard → your site → Use your own AI.
Questions people ask
- Is my quiz broken?
- Almost certainly not. A quiz never runs in a preview, by design - so a preview showing no questions is the normal, expected result, not a fault. What your enrolled students see on the published course is a different thing entirely.
- Why can't the preview show the questions?
- Because a quiz is marked for a particular learner. The questions and answers are held back and only sent out once someone signs in as an enrolled student, which is also what stops the answers being readable by anyone who looks at the page. A preview has nobody signed in, so there is nobody to send them to.
- How do I actually check my quiz then?
- Enrol yourself. Set the course so it isn't publicly on sale, publish it, enrol your own email address, and open it from the welcome email. You then see the quiz exactly as a student does, and can sit it. Nothing you approve is affected by this - the preview simply cannot run a quiz.
- Bernard told me every quiz on my site was broken. Was he wrong?
- Yes, and this is why. An assistant looking at previews sees an error box where the questions should be, on every quiz, and reasonably concludes the site is broken. It isn't - it is looking at the one place a quiz can never run. Ask it to check whether any student has actually completed a quiz before believing it.
- What does the error actually mean?
- Only that the page could not fetch its questions from where it is being viewed. In a preview that is expected. On your published course, with a signed-in student, it would mean something real - so if a student reports it, tell us.