So, you’ve created and published your brand new course, you go to launch it, and at some point in the course, you see this dreaded message:

Why does this happen?

It happens because the course player cannot decode something that’s in the page. If you were to look at the corrupted page in your browser you’d see an error, something like this:

What do I do next?

Most times that this happens, is after you’ve copied and pasted something into a page in ECB that the browser doesn’t like and cannot render on screen.

It doesn’t matter what language you use to create ECB courses, a corrupt text character (normally caused by copying and pasting from Word straight into ECB) will cause a page to not load when deployed. So, check that all your text is exactly how it should be before you deploy your course.

That wasn’t it, what else could it be?

There was an undocumented feature in ECB V1 (which of course I have now just documented so I urge you to not use it!). Unfortunately ECB V1 let you paste images into the body text of a page:

You might be lucky and get away with it, unless of course you’ve just copied a source image straight from your digital camera! The course player is simply not designed to try and load a massive image (it will break the underlying course structure) and, if by chance the page does load, your people learning using their mobile devices are unlikely to appreciate it if they end up with a large data bill.

The good news is that we have closed this down so you cannot paste images into a text area. Watch this space for an exciting release in Q4 2024 which will be all new Course Builder and will give you much greater flexibility when adding images to your courses!

Anything else it could be?

Another reason could be that you hadn’t quite finished building your course, for example you might have an untracked quiz:

However, if you haven’t filled out all the quiz data fields, including the correct and incorrect feedback areas:

… then, unfortunately, the quiz won’t be able to load. You’ll need to correct the missing areas, and then try deploying the course again.

If you are creating your own courses in Easy Course Builder with your own videos then you’ll have your own Vimeo account where you’ll upload all of your videos. This is a subscription service so please check with your account holder that your Vimeo subscription hasn’t lapsed!

If you’ve tried all of these things and it’s still not working then it could be that there’s been a delay from when you deployed the course to when ECB does its thing and sets the course up on the server. Remember, if you have created many modules each with the maximum number of 7 items, then it could take several minutes to deploy!