March 2021 Release Notes

March 2021 Release Notes

  1. Email Platform Integration - Marketing integration allows for a choice between the MailChimp and ActiveCampaign platforms. These two industry leaders should be able to handle most school's requirements. 

  1. Bulk Availability Manager & Session Lookup - Sometimes Admins need to add or remove availability for all teachers for some time frame, these two new tools will help with this process. To get to the Bulk Availability Manager go to Scheduling > Availability Manager. From this page you can select a date range (the month of April for example) and a time range (all sessions from 5 PM to 6 PM) and add an unavailability for all teachers for those times. Sometimes these changes in availability might affect some sessions, to keep track of this, the Availability Manager allows you to navigate to the Session Lookup tool which will show what sessions are happening for the given time frame.

  1. Substitute Teacher Lookup Performance - Finding a compatible substitute teacher can be a computationally expensive process. The process requires the system to take all teachers who can teach a subject, review their availability, and cross reference it with their current schedules. This process was taking upwards of one minute per session to be suspended which was extremely slow. Using some clever engineering, we were able to speed up this process to be about 3x faster.

  1. Task Users - We have added thumbnails of the users that each task is referencing. For example, if a task is about student Jimmy canceling their class, we now show Jimmy's profile image thumbnail on the task list. Clicking on the image takes you to the student, teacher, or staff member's profile page.

  1. Scheduling Time Zones - When reviewing automated evaluations, and other types of evaluations, we have added more information about the student's time zone. This should help the staff who is scheduling this student get a better sense of what times are good for the student.

  1. Scheduled System Notifications - Our System Notifications engine has been upgraded to allow for notifications to go out on future dates. Both Email and SMS notifications can be scheduled. This should allow for better marketing and system notifications to go out at specific times and dates.

  1. Class Homework Widget - To each student's class dashboard, we have added a new widget. This small section will remind the student what homework the teacher assigned in the last session. This widget will also show up for teachers and staff, just so they are also in the loop as to what homework was assigned. Note that the homework that is shown in this widget comes from the text entered by the teacher, so if the teacher did not enter anything, it'll show the student that they do not have homework.

  1. School Managers - We have added a new user role called "School Manager" which will handle a large subset of what the School Admins can do. In particular, they have access to all items in the "Management" section in the side menu.

  1. School Admin System Notifications - Previously, the system notifications page was limited in what could be done by a school admin. In this update we have unlocked all the functionality so that School Admins can send to the same users as the Super Admins can.

  1. Unit Publish All - In the course outline we've added a new button for each unit which allows the staff member to publish all unit material in the unit with one action. This saves staff time when they have multiple unit items in a unit that all need to be published at once.

  1. Learning Material Visibility - To make sure both teachers and students get access to "Activity" learning material, we have changed the default visibility of these unit items to "Teacher & Students".

  1. Hiring Page Overview - When reviewing applicants for hiring positions it was a bit confusing as to how to view their application. We have now linked the applicant's name to their application overview. Clicking on the applicant's name will show you all the information about their application.

  1. Better Redirect - When editing group class terms, after saving a term, the system would previously redirect you back to the manage classes page with the one-on-one tab selected. We have now updated it so it takes you to the group classes tab.

  1. Clean Up Tasks - There are currently over a dozen different task types in the system. Many of these are handled on specific report pages such as the "Not Enrolled Students" report. Tasks that are handled in other pages like these have now been excluded from the main task list to reduce the amount of superfluous tasks that a staff member sees in their generic task list.

  1. Scheduled News Articles - To have greater control over when an article will publish, and when an article will unpublish; we have added the ability to schedule news posts down to the minute. Previously, news articles could only be scheduled down to the day.

  1. Teacher Default Calendar View - To give the teachers a better idea of their schedule, we have updated the default calendar view from "month" view to "week" view. Any teachers that were previously set to month view have been changed to week view. To get to this preference, go to the teacher profile > System Preferences > Default Calendar View.

  1. Completed Date - When a unit item is completed, we are now showing the date it was completed on the outline. This date will show in the format "Completed | {date-completed}".

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