Sapling Learning v24 Release Notes

We will deploy an upgrade (version 24) to all sites tomorrow morning (Wednesday, 12/21) at approximately 4am Central. This release includes several bug fixes and new features, such as...

Grades:

• "Include excluded or in-progress grades" option: When this option is set to "yes" for a category, in-progress scores (ie, green scores) will be included in the overall average for that category. Normally green scores are not included in the overall average.

Teacher Tools:

We added a suite of features to the "Participants" list for your course to allow instructors to self-manage more aspects of their courses.

• More Information on Participants: Instructors can now see the Username and ID Number settings for students in their courses.
• Instructor Edit Participant Data: Instructors can now edit the First Name, Last Name, and ID Number of students in their courses.
• Instructor Reset User Password: Instructors can now quickly reset the passwords of students in their courses. A possible temporary password is automatically suggested, or you can choose your own passwords for your students. We highly recommend giving different passwords to any users you reset, and only using this feature very sparingly.
• Instructor Export Participant Roster: Instructors can now export a class roster from the Participants report.
• Instructor Upload Fixes to Roster: Using the exported roster, instructors can upload fixing to the roster for their course. The "Sapling UserID" field is used to identify the student, so be sure not to change this for any students; if you change it to another student in your course, those students will swap all work within Sapling.
• Instructor Easily Remove Students: You can now remove students who don't belong in your course from the Participants report. When appropriate, the students will receive a refund or Sapling credit (the refund/credit part does not apply to the high school server).
• Instructor Easily Add Former Students Back to Course: You can now add students who were formerly in your course back from the Participants report. Note: This may not apply to students removed before this feature was implemented (they likely will not be listed as Former Students).
• High School: Instructor Create New Users: On the high school server, if you have fewer users in your course than your allotment, you can create new users up to that allotment. If you do not have this feature available, contact your TechTA for help (they may need to set your user limit for existing courses).

Due Dates:

• Group Assignment Date Settings: We updated how "available from offsets" and "due date extensions" are stored and used by the system, making it easier to configure special offsets for a specific assignment for a specific group. Now, if a student later adds to that group, that offset will apply for that assignment for that user.

Payment:

• Full-Sequence Bookstore Cards: We now have the ability to accept full-sequence (two-semester, three-quarter, etc) access codes. If you would like to have a full-sequence card available in your bookstore, talk to your sales rep.

Authoring:

• Further Vector Module Improvements: Several features were added to the Vector Diagrams Module to allow the Physics team to ask more questions involving these diagrams.

We will have another release in mid-to-late January.