Products: Accelerated Reader, Renaissance Home Connect, Star Custom, Star Early Literacy, Star Math, Star Reading
Platform: Macintosh, Windows
Last Updated: 4/11/2022
Issue
General Troubleshooting for Renaissance customers.
Reason
The troubleshooting processes listed below will help you to resolve issues specific to your Renaissance website, such as:
- Unable to connect to your Renaissance website
- Errors in the software or slow performance on Renaissance website
- Students experience freezing, a spinning icon, blank page between questions or their Star test may end unexpectedly with a "Network Connection Error"
Resolution
If you are experiencing any of the following problems, try the general troubleshooting processes listed below before contacting customer support. Make sure that you try using your Renaissance applications on multiple workstations, devices, or platforms (if possible) to determine whether or not the problem that you are encountering can be narrowed down to a workstation or operating system issue. If you are still encountering problems after trying the following, please call us at 800-338-4204 or email support@renaissance.com.
Unable to connect to your Renaissance website
In order to connect to our server, you need to be connected to the Internet. If you receive "Page cannot be displayed" or "Server not found" notifications when trying to access your Renaissance site, try another website. If you are unable to get to other websites, either the computer or device is not connected to the internet via a network cable or Wi-Fi OR the internet communications may be going through a firewall or content server that is blocking access. These issues will need to be addressed by the school or district technical staff.
Try accessing our corporate website, http://www.renaissance.com. If you are unable to access one or both of these sites, your ISP may be blocking access. If you are able to enter the sites listed but not your hosted site, you should call Renaissance customer support so that we can assist you with additional troubleshooting.
Errors in the software or slow performance on Renaissance website
The errors listed below may occur if your district or school network has a firewall, proxy server, or content filtering software that is preventing access to resources that are used by your Renaissance software. See Allowing access to Renaissance resources for detailed information on which resources need to be allowed.
- When logging into your Renaissance site, it's taking over a minute to access the login page and each subsequent page within the software.
- Personnel users are not seeing the Live Chat link on the right side of the screen when logged in.
- Reports will generate and appear on-screen, but clicking the PDF button results in a Loading message that does not go away.
- While taking a Renaissance Star Math test, students see the message, "There was a system error. Please ask your teacher or monitor for help," and the test closes out.
- While taking a Renaissance Star Early Literacy test, students see a blank screen, the browser freezes when loading the demo video or the practice questions, the question and answer choices are missing, the image for the Listen button disappears, and/or there is no sound.
Students experience freezing, a spinning icon, or a blank page between questions or their Star test may end unexpectedly with a "Network Connection Error"
Review your network infrastructure for configuration settings that may be closing idle connections without sending acknowledgement messages either due to timeout settings, blocking, throttling, or performance (including dropping packets). One specific area to review is your firewall settings. Many firewall applications will have a setting which controls whether or not closed connections are acknowledged either inbound or outbound. For example, on Cisco devices the settings "Send Reset Reply for Denied Inbound TCP Packets" and "Send Reset Reply for Denied Outbound TCP Packets" control the acknowledgment of closed connections.