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.