Live chat: now in all your Populi courses

Plus, full LTI capability and other improvements

New in Populi courses: live chat! Now your instructors and students can converse in real-time right in any Populi course. Chats let you embed images (even from Instagram), videos from YouTube and Vimeo, documents from Scribd, and even use emoji characters. They're easy to set up: just schedule one and everyone in the class—students, auditors, profs, teaching assistants—can join the conversation.

5-8-13 chatroom

To use chat, the course instructor just needs to click Chat and start a new chat session. There's nothing to set up or figure out—it's live and ready to go in every Populi course.

Populi now has full LTI capability

A few months ago we added some basic LTI functionality, letting you link Populi courses to Moodle (or any other LTI-capable LMS). We beefed this feature up in two key areas:

  • The LTI connection now lets the external LMS pass grades back through to Populi's gradebook
  • Faculty no longer need to remember the consumer key and shared secret to link to the external LMS

Read more about it in our Knowledge Base.

Here's some other stuff we released recently:

The Data Slicer has a few new reporting options:

  • You can now get data for Cumulative Credits across All Terms (which lets you get data out of Populi that was previously tedious to retrieve)
  • We also added Unknown and Blank to the Exit Reason options in the Data Slicer, as well as a new condition called Student Role Status, which has options for Active and Inactive

The Degree Audit now shows incomplete courses in the "not completed" view.

Course evaluations have a new faculty visibility option: Available after 60% completion and course is finalized.

You can now create custom course Delivery Methods in Academic Settings. We also let you use Delivery Method as a fee rule. And, you can now include Delivery Method in the XLS export of the Courses Table.

Custom transcripts can now include course comments and progam-based honors (contact support if you'd like us to update your transcript template).