v29 Release Notes

We've posted release notes for our June release at the Sapling Learning Status blog.

Sapling Learning v28 Release Notes

v28 will be released to all servers on Tuesday, May 1, between 4am and 6am CDT. Release notes are available on our server status blog.

Sapling Learning v27 Release Notes

v27 has been released to all servers. Release notes are available on our server status blog.

Sapling Learning v26 Release Notes

Wednesday morning we deployed an upgrade (version 26) to all servers (www.saplinglearning.com, www.saplinglearning.ca, and hs.saplinglearning.com). This release included several bug fixes and new features, such as:

• Our Vector Diagram module is now ready in physics. Physics users should see questions featuring this module soon.
• If you're interested in writing questions from scratch, check out the new video here. 
• You can now choose whether or not to "Count unstarted assignments as 0" when you export grades.
• Our Anywhere Activities (beta) can now be embedded as either an icon (which launches the activity in a new window) or a full embed within that page.
• Guided demos are available for each of our subjects here.
• We will soon have RSS Feeds available to add to the side of your courses.
• The drawers in the Activity Sidebar have been rearranged to facilitate easier use.

The next schedule release will occur in the week of March 21.

Updated Service Agreement

In version 25, we also released an updated service agreement and privacy policy to all servers, to clarify some wording.

Sapling Learning v25 Release Notes

Wednesday morning, we deployed an upgrade (version 25) to all sites. This release focused primarily on bug fixes and changes to the front page of our site (the part outside of the login).

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.

Changes to Facebook Connect

We're releasing an update for our Facebook login system to use their updated API. Tomorrow (Tuesday, 12/13), Facebook will turn off the old API. We do not believe this will cause us any issues, but, if you cannot log in through Facebook, please let us know at facebook@saplinglearning.com.

Site Outage, 12/2/11

Our US higher education site was down today starting at about 12:30pm CST (and was experiencing slow-downs leading up to the outage). This outage was caused by an issue with our Calendar and Upcoming Events system. The issue has been resolved. No student data was impacted. We will continue to monitor the situation to make sure the issue cannot arise again.

Unless instructors tell us otherwise, we will be granting extensions on all assignments that were due between 12pm CST today and 5pm CST Sunday. Such assignments will be due by Monday.

We apologize for the inconvenience and frustration.

Sapling Learning v1.23 Release Notes

We plan to push another release to all servers tomorrow morning (Wednesday, 11/23). This release includes several bug fixes and enhancements:

1. There's now a "forgot password" link when users link their Facebook account to their Sapling account.
2. We now warn instructors if you try to lock an assignment, since this rarely happens on purpose (locking prevents student scores for that assignment from saving the the gradebook; this can be useful if you want to temporarily stop gradebook updates, but it's confusing if you do it accidentally).
3. Due date extensions and available from offsets will no longer misbehave when instructors in timezones outside of Central try to set them.
4. Removing a due date or available from date from an assignment now removes its corresponding extensions or offsets.
5. We fixed a bug that caused extended due dates to sometimes fail to appear in the student Activity Sidebar (dates instead would show as, for example, "11//2011").
6. Hand-Graded Activities now show due dates and grade information on the main course page.
7. We fixed a bug in the unpaid student cleaner, so they should finally disappear from your gradebook.

Happy Thanksgiving!

UPDATE: The release will occur between 2:30am and 4:30am tonight/tomorrow morning, 11/23/2011.

Sapling Learning v1.22 Release Notes

Today we are releasing new features to our higher-ed servers (www.saplinglearning.com and www.saplinglearning.ca). The release included several bug fixes and enhancements. Most notably:

• Instructors can now Switch role to... Student (at the top-right of the main course page) in their courses without being asked to pay.
• We made some fixes to the Clock, available to instructors under Turn editing on, then Add... under Blocks at the bottom-right, then Clock. This displays the server time adjusted to the user's timezone, and verifies that users have their timezone and institution set properly.
• Instructors can add available from offsets and due date extensions for groups on a per-assignment basis, making it easier to add multiple extensions at once. This is in the same interface as the other offsets and extensions.
• Unpaid students will now be removed from courses two weeks after the grace period ends. Such students will be cleared out of current courses over the course of the next day or two (since we did not have this cleaner in place when the grace periods ended for this semester's courses, there are more students than usual for the system to clear out).

As you have probably seen, the US release (www.saplinglearning.com) took longer than anticipated when an error on one of our volumes forced us to restore the site from a backup made as part of the release process. We apologize for the inconvenience.

UPDATE: The site was down from 2:54am to 10:12am Central for the update. We apologize again for the inconvenience.

Sapling Learning v1.21 Release Notes

We had a small release this week (the second release on our regular every-other-week release schedule). These are what we fixed:

• Due Date Extensions and Available From Offsets: We fixed a rare bug that resulted in students having two copies of extensions or offsets for the same assignment (which made it difficult for you to update their due dates or available from dates).
• We toned down the screen reader popup. Hopefully it will be less annoying now. We've started work on a replacement that will make it completely unnecessary while keeping us in compliance with disability laws.
• We made some improvements on the Vector Diagrams Module, coming soon to Physics content near you.

We'll have another set of fixes in two weeks. See you then!

Sapling Learning v1.20.1 Release Notes

We're pushing out another minor release today to fix a rare issue in our refund system. If you were affected by this bug, we'll contact you soon to sort out the issue.

Sapling Learning v1.20 Release Notes

This morning we pushed out a small bug-fix release. This is what it fixed:

Activities:

• Your mouse pointer will no longer disappear at the left edge of the Sidebar.
• In the Sidebar, due dates and available from dates will now always display the correct times to students (they were off by an hour or two in some circumstances).
• When you set a new due date or available from date on an activity, group offsets and extensions will now properly apply.
• When you create a new individual due date extension after the due date, that assignment will properly re-open for that student.
• Students on the High School server can no longer accidentally break their password.
• We also released an update to our behind-the-scenes course-creation system on the High School server. 

We will continue with our regular biweekly release schedule next Monday. Let me know if you have any comments, questions, or suggestions for the software at feedback@saplinglearning.com.

Sapling Learning v1.19 Release Notes

This week we released an update to our software on all servers. This was the first release of a new regular, every-other-week release schedule:

• Monday: saplinglearning.ca (next major release: 10/24)
• Tuesday: saplinglearning.com  (next major release: 10/25)
• Wednesday: hs.saplinglearning.com  (next major release: 10/26)

This week's release contained several new features and bug fixes (over 90 separate issues). Here's some of what it contained:

Accounts:

• Easier Facebook connection for existing users.
• We now show "Institution" on user profiles, rather than "City, State" and "Country."
• Better validation of registration forms to avoid some common issues.
• Changes to the available profile fields on our high school servers.

Student Assignments:

• Improvements to our beta Anywhere Activities (assignments that can be embedded within books or on web pages, etc).
• Interface improvements to the assignment Sidebar.
• Improvements to the due date view in the assignment Sidebar (but this has a bug that will be fixed Monday; if the due date in the Sidebar doesn't match the due date on your course page, the due date on your course page is the correct value).
• Screen Reader text for text areas (we know it's kind of annoying right now, bear with us; we had to get something in place for our visually impaired students, we'll clean it up a bit in our next major release).

Instructor Assignment Settings:

• Your TechTA can now reset assignments for individual students (they used to have to go through a more complicated process to do so).
• Your TechTA can now change the score on an individual question for an individual student (again, they used to have to put in a request for this to happen).
• Your TechTA can now reset an individual question for an individual student, to allow them to try again (all three of these features will eventually be made available to instructors, after the TechTAs help me find any remaining kinks).
• You can now set up an "Available From Offset" for assignments, making assignments available for certain groups or individual students later or earlier than others. This could be used to make a post-lab assignment available to each section of a lab after their lab session, for example, or to let one student into an assignment early.
• We updated the "Uncategorized" setting on your Activities and Due Dates page to "Default," to make it clearer what that category is for.
• Assignments Stats now show an Average for each student.

Authoring:

• We fixed a bug making it difficult to reuse images in questions you author.
• We made a number of changes to our Vector Diagrams module for physics (although we still have a few more fixes to make to finalize this module).

Course Management:

• You can now import assignments from previous courses (or from your current course, if you want to duplicate an assignment). Your TechTA can walk you through how that works.
• We added a "Clock" block, which you can find under "Turn editing on" and then in the "Blocks" drop-down at the bottom of the rightmost column. This block shows the current server time, adjusted to the user's time zone setting. It also warns students if their time zone doesn't match their institution's time zone, and allows them to quickly fix it.
• We also made a number of behind-the-scenes changes to course settings to make it easier for your TechTA to create your course.

Layout:

• The friendly faces staring down from the top of every page are much smaller on the main page (after you log in), and we removed them from every other page. You can now see more of your course without scrolling.

Payment:

• We made several improvements to the payment system. Unfortunately, a typo in these changes currently prevents many of you from using "Switch role to Student," but we will fix that issue in our next major release.

Other:

• We fixed and updated several things on the "landing page" (the part of the site you see before you log in).
• We made several tweaks to the database to speed up some things.
• We made numerous bug fixes.

We will have a small release Monday to fix a few issues (I'll post release notes for that once it's out). We also hope to give you some more visibility soon into some things we're working on, such as this pad-shaped thing (see photo at right) that we're working on for Fall 2012.

Sporadic Site Slowness, 8/29

Last night (8/29) we experienced sporadic site slow-downs for many users from approximately 7:13 pm CDT to 10:29 pm CDT. This was caused by an unoptimized configuration setting on our servers which capped the number of users allowed to access the site at any one time. The issue has been resolved, and the site is now running faster than it ever has.

We're extending due dates by 24 hours for students who might have been affected by the slow-downs.

If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, please contact your TechTA (for instructors) or support@saplinglearning.com (for students). We apologize for any frustration the slowness may have caused.

Sapling Learning v1.18 Release Notes

Last week, we released several new features to both the US and Canadian higher-education servers. A lot of the changes in this update were behind-the-scenes, but these are the things you might notice:

Activities

• Instructor Quick-Edit on Activities and Due Dates: Instructors can now edit all of the settings (except "Description") for every assignment in your course at once from the "Activities and Due Dates" page. This should be helpful if you want to change the policies for several assignments at once, for example. We also added a "Save All" button on that page to commit all of your updates (the changes you made don't "stick" until you click the individual save icon for each one or the "Save All" button at the bottom).

Course Settings

• Subject and Term: We now explicitly track the Subject and Term (1st semester of  2, 2nd quarter of 3, etc) for courses, so that we can offer better statistics in future updates.

Users/Logins

• Name Changes: Users can now request name changes after account creation. We changed this to a by-request system to help combat a way we knew might work for cheating purposes, but which it doesn't look like any students had discovered; now they'll never get a chance.
• User Institution Settings: On sign-up, we now ask users to choose their Institution (college, university, etc) instead of to tell us their City, State, and Country. We're putting this in place to allow us to streamline the account-creation and course-selection process for the Spring. We'll also start suggesting the appropriate timezone to users based on their institution to help avoid a rare but annoying issue (when students select the wrong timezone and are therefore told the wrong time for due dates).
• Cleaner Login: The Canada server received the Facebook login fixes and the updated login-box look.

Payment/Enrollment

• New Payment System: We completed overhauled the back-end to handle payments in our system. This will allow us to make several improvements (such as the multi-course discounts described below). The thing you're most likely to encounter right now is that we can upload rosters to enroll students in a course even with for-pay courses now.
• Easier Refunds: We updated our refund system to make it easier for us (or even instructors) to grant refunds to students. After we get a few more safeguards in place, we'll also be able to open up self-directed refunds to students (so they'll be able to request a refund within 60 days of purchase and receive the refund immediately).
• Grace Periods: Students now have two weeks to use most courses for free before they have to pay. We hope this will make things easier for students who later drop the course (they can simply use the course without paying if they aren't sure, then only pay when they've made their final decision).
• Multi-Course Discounts: We can now offer a discount for students who purchase multiple quarters or semesters of a course at once (for example, for $29.99 courses, students can purchase two semesters at $49.99 and save $9.99).

Let us know at feedback@saplinglearning.com if you have any comments about these or any other features, or especially if you have an idea for a neat new feature. We're constantly developing new features, and we have a very long list of things we'd like to do, but it never hurts to hear what people want.

Sapling Learning v1.17 Release Notes

We released a minor update this morning, continuing our data restructuring and fixing a few small issues. The most noticeable change (for those of you who use Firefox 4) is that you can now set due-date extensions in Firefox 4.

We will have a much larger release in about a month, but we do not currently anticipate significant downtime for that update.

Sapling Learning v1.16 Release Notes

This morning we released another update to the site. This one wasn't as noticeable as our last release, but we're hoping you'll find it helpful. Here's what it included.

Activities

• Web Help & Videos Drawer: We've added another drawer to the Activity Sidebar, containing a web search tailored to the subject of the assignment (general chemistry, biochemistry, etc) and the topic of the question (stoichiometry, SN1 reactions, etc). If we don't have anything specific in our Help With This Topic drawer, hopefully the web can help students out. This drawer is disabled if you disable resources for the assignment.
• Better Data Structure: This won't be visible yet, but we've made another improvement to the way we store student responses for assignments. This will allow us to streamline some things in the future (and speed up load times), and to produce much more detailed reports about how students performed on assignments. Once we finish crunching the existing data into this new format (it's happening in the background over the next week or two), we'll show you a preview of what this new format will allow us to show you.

User Accounts and Login:

• Facebook Connect Improvements: We've made our Facebook Connect integration easier to use. This should clear up any problems users have had using Facebook to log into the site. Note: We don't share any information with Facebook, we only use it to make creating accounts and logging in faster and easier.

Course Settings:

• Course Institutions: We've added a formal "Institution" setting to the settings for each course. This will be invisible to you (your TechTA set it already), but it will allow us to make it easier soon for students to find your course.

Gradebook:

• Better Scrolling: We removed the extra horizontal scrollbar in the gradebook, letting the scrollbar at the bottom of your browser window do the work. It looks a little ugly right now if your gradebook extends into the right margin, but we wanted to get the functionality in place right away. We'll clean up around the edges in an upcoming release.

In addition to those changes, we made several minor fixes to the new site, and a few behind-the-scenes bug fixes.

We'll have another major release around July, introducing several big changes for the Fall.

Sapling Learning in Canada

We're pleased to announce that SaplingLearning.ca is now available for our friends north of the border. This server has the same functionality as SaplingLearning.com, but all information for the Canadian version is stored on servers physically located in Canada.

If you already use Sapling Learning at a Canadian school, your TechTA will let you know when to transition to the new server (most likely at the start of the next semester; if your course is already started for the summer, it won't happen just yet).

If you have any questions about the Canadian server, ask your TechTA, or let us know at casupport@saplinglearning.com.