New release improves Search, Degree Audits, Relationships, and Statements

Last night we pushed out a minor new release that includes improvements to a variety of existing features...

Degree Audit

We put the most work into a refresh of Degree Audits, accompanying some aesthetic updates with a number of improvements that will make them even more useful to advisors, registrars, and students.

On the back-end, we now point Degree Audits to the specific Course Instances the student has taken. On the front-end, this lets us include a student's grades on the Audit—and, for Courses that permit retakes for credit, you can apply a course taken multiple times to more than one Course Group. We've also clarified how Courses are applied to different Course Groups, making it easier to see how the student is fulfilling his Degree Course Requirements. Another little thing—Degrees are now displayed in chronological order in both the Degree Audit and Transcript.

Relationships

It turns out that sibling, spouse, parent, child, and roommate don't cover all the possible relationships among people. Taking a cue from—well, life—we added a bunch of new Relationship types—Guardian/Ward, Student/Teacher, Friend, and... plain ol' Relative! To help you keep track of genetic similarities and other shared physical traits, we also added pictures to the Relationships panel. Perhaps most important, you can also now designate any related person as an Emergency Contact. Quite a few customers have asked for that, and we're happy to finally release a way to track that important piece of information.

Statements (and some other Financial items)

In response to some thoughtful customer feedback we've received about student financial statements, we updated those, too. Now you have two options for Statements: the Term Statement, which details the student's financial activity for a given Academic Term, and a new Statement available on the student's Financial Dashboard. This new Statement collects all of the student's outstanding invoices into one printable document. Accordingly, you can also print these Statements in a batch right from the Unpaid Invoices report in Populi Billing.

Two other items of note... The new By Term Summary gives you a more detailed snapshot of the student's balance. We also moved all of the commands to the action gear in Profile > Financial.

Search

Simply put, Search is a lot faster and lets you search by a wider variety of information fields—Addresses, Phone Numbers, Email, Student ID, and more. Watch the video to get a sense of it... or, if you're a user, log in to Populi and try it out yourself!

Miscellaneous

Facilities got moved up to the Account Bar. We added some user account status tracking, so you can now see the last time a user logged in, or if they never have. We clarified the transfer credits interface to help ensure you pick a Program for each transferred course. Student ID numbers now display right below a student's name on their Profile. Plus the usual round of bugfixes, minor interface tweaks, and other little things that don't merit being mentioned by name in a blog post (those are all covered in the Release Notes in the help desk...).