June 2021 Release Notes

June 2021 Release Notes

  • On Demand Courses - Previously known as Self Learning, these types of courses will be offered to students who want to learn at their own pace without any teachers or schedules to worry about.
    • Tuitions - On Demand courses require autopay to be enabled for their account before they can enroll. Students of on demand courses are given the option of a monthly tuition, or a one time payment. These tuitions are set up on a course by course basis. If one-time-payment is selected, they are invoiced immediately upon enrollment. If monthly tuition is selected, the student receives a prorated invoice for the first month, and will be invoiced every 28 days after (just like one-on-one classes). If at any point the student's auto payment does not go through, the system will unenroll them from autopay and mark the class as suspended and eventually canceled if they do not pay.
    • Scheduling / Sessions - On Demand courses do not have scheduling, sessions, or teachers. This means anything related to sessions has been removed, such as daily grades, class calendars, and upcoming events.
    • Course Outline - Since there is no teacher to mark learning material as completed, this functionality has been added to the student for these on demand courses. Students can mark their unit-items, units, and subject levels as completed to progress through the class. In some cases we want this to be a bit of a transparent process, for these cases, we have added a course outline option for "Auto-Complete Outline" which when enabled will automatically mark unit-items as completed as soon as a student views them, marks units as completed as soon as all unit-items in it are completed, and lastly marks subject levels as completed when all units are completed. Another option for course outlines that has been added is the "Scheduled Unit Access" option which essentially "drips" units so that students do not complete subject level content at a rate higher than what the schools believe is acceptable. By turning on this option, the staff member can select how many hours after completing a unit the student must wait until the next unit is available.
    • History - To better keep tabs on how long students are taking to complete levels, units, and unit-items, we have added some new history tracking for when each of these are completed which allow staff to calculate how long it took to complete.
    • Trial Periods - Tuitions can now have trials enabled for them. When this is done the student's first invoice is delayed by the specified amount of days. For example, a trial on an on demand course for 7 days means the student will not be invoiced for the class until 7 days after they enroll.
    • Focus Class View - For on demand classes, the layout of the class dashboard has changed quite a bit. This was done in order to create an environment that allows the students to better focus on the class material rather than schedules, sessions, teachers, grades, etc.
  • Stripe Autopay Update - To get the latest security updates and to allow for better global compatibility, we have upgraded our Stripe autopay implementation to the latest version. This upgrade better handles new regulations (like SCA, and regional payment method requirements) and handles these complex rules automatically. Additionally this update allows for an easier integration with Stripe to replace Freshbooks if we decide to go down that route.
  • Preserving Navigation - Throughout the portal there are pages with multiple tabs, when navigating away from these pages and back, the system would normally take you to the default tab. With this new setting called "Preserve Navigation" in the System Preferences (per user), the system will now keep track of what tab you were just on and will put you back on that tab. Another place where this setting is useful is for table setting preference saving. This means things like what page you were on in a table, and what you had the table sorted by, or filtered by will all be preserved. Page tabs, and table navigation is only saved temporarily, so you will not see this preservation across multiple devices, or if you turn your computer off.
  • Reports
    • Conversion Rate Report - (GDS Report) This report shows enrollment conversions. How many students who signed up for accounts, actually enrolled in classes. Shown as a percentage of (daily student sign ups) / (daily student enrollments). Filtering by course allows you to measure which courses have the highest conversions.
    • Tuition Breakdown Report - This report shows the breakdown of invoice tuitions grouped by hours per month.
    • Student Trend Report - The student trend report has been modified to include different student statuses such as active, on hold, suspended, canceled, completed, and pending.
    • Course Trend Report - (GDS Report) This report shows how many enrollments each course has received in the given time period. Additionally, the report shows the names of the classes, and when they enrolled.
  • Rate This Course Widget - A new rating widget has been added to the class dashboard. When enabled for the school, it'll show up on the class dashboard and will be shown to the student every X days, where X is a setting in the system settings (defaults to 14 days). A new report to view these ratings was created and can be found in the reports list.
  • Course Level Visibility - Much like the ability to set special availability options for units, we have added the ability to mark course levels with special availability rules. Not that these options compound, so an open level, but closed unit will mean the unit is closed.
  • Manage Teachers Permission - We have reworked the permissions to manage teachers so that this has to be specifically enabled. Previously most staff had the ability to view and edit teachers, with this new permission modification, only School Admins and School Managers will be able to edit teacher information. 
  • Manage First Impression Categories - The student/teacher characteristics (first impressions) are grouped into different sections (categories). Each section has similar items which you can only choose one of at a time. For example the internet section asks what kind of internet speed they have. Previously, these sections were hard coded and could not be edited by staff members. Now these sections can be added, edited, and deleted. Note that deleting a section will delete all the characteristics in the section, thus could affect matching scores.
  • Student Vacations - Student vacations have the ability to mark sections of time as "unavailable" for the student. Previously this was only done once (at the time the vacation was approved), however this has been changed to instead be persistent as long as the vacation remains active. For example, if a student marks that they will not be available for the month of July, even if the student's class schedule is updated, the system will prevent any sessions from being generated for July.
  • View Classes for Course Quick Link - To easily see which classes are set up for each course, you can now navigate to the Manage Courses page, and click on the number of classes for each course to pull up the Manage Classes page filtered by that course.
  • View Admin Reports Permission - Report access has been moved from being "Admin Only" to being permission specific. Any user with the "View Reports" permission can see all of the system reports in the application. This will be enabled for School Admins and School Managers.
  • Better Referral History - We are now tracking when a staff member manually creates a student referral. This will help with any confusion why a referral was applied, or why a referral hasn't applied yet. Another important piece of information in student referrals is the date referred, which can be overridden by staff members. This date is now shown on the table that shows all referrals and help text has been added to better explain that this date must be before a class' start date if it is supposed to apply to a particular class.
  • Users Table Advanced Search - Searching for users in the system can be difficult if you don't have all the student's information. In order to allow staff to search, and filter for users better, we have added some advanced search capabilities to the Manage Users page. This adds the ability to search for users on things like notes, email addresses, phone numbers, Salary IDs, and other misc fields.
  • Invite Your Friends Widget - Students can now invite other people to join Studio Arabiya directly from their dashboard. This new widget labeled "Invite Your Friends" will pop up a window where they can enter a list of emails to invite. This sends them an invite email to create a free account in the school. All users invited are also added to the school's marketing system and an "invited" event is triggered on the new user. A report of all the invited users is available in Reports > Student Invites Report.
  • Session Rescheduling Overrides - When a student runs out of rescheduling hours (half of their tuition hours for the month), they are not allowed to reschedule any more sessions. This may now be overridden by users with the "Reschedule Override" permission. Admins and School Managers will be given this permission by default.
  • Course Wishlist - When a student sees a course they want to take, they can now "heart" the course and it'll be saved in their Course Wishlist. If the student unhearts the course, it'll be removed from the wishlist.
  • Incomplete Units Warning - When a teacher tries to complete a unit or a unit-item that still has incomplete items, they will now be warned with a list of unit / unit-items that are incomplete. 
  • Required Student Fields For Staff - When creating, and editing students sometimes staff members do not know some of the student's information such as DOB, Phone number, County, and State. Previously, staff had to add some fake data such as "N/A". In order to prevent data pollution and to make it easier for Staff, these fields are no longer required for Staff. 

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