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.