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.