As September eclipsed August, the Populi crew stayed up into the wee hours pushing our new course and files features out into the wild. We've previewed our new features in a few recent blog posts; here's a more complete description of what's new in Populi this morning...
Courses
We moved course instances over to our new tabbed layout, improving the look and organization of Populi courses.
Tabs include Dashboard, Info, Assignments, Lessons, Discussions, Tests, Calendar, Roster, Gradebook, Attendance, and Reporting.
The new Course Dashboard features Course Alerts, a revamped Bulletin Board, a Schedule of upcoming course events, and updates to your Discussions.
Assignments now come in three flavors: Grade-only (just a grade, nuthin' more), Test (creates an online test), and File (lets teacher and student interact and revise a file, document, etc.).
Lessons now let you incorporate streaming media right from the lesson content thanks to our new files setup.
Discussions can now be course-wide or pinned to particular Lessons.
Tests feature two new question types: True/False and Matching. They're also created via "test" type assignments.
The course Calendar is now a tab right on the course page and feeds upcoming events into the course Dashboard.
Reporting features the Performance Dashboard and an enhanced Change Log.
Files
Free file storage—including hosting, bandwidth, and streaming—included with every pricing plan, with extra storage available for $2.50 per GB per month.
Increased file upload sizes throughout Populi for all your users.
New large file uploader lets faculty and Admins upload files up to 2 GB in size.
Video files automatically encoded into multiple formats optimized for playback on multiple kinds of devices.
Miscellaneous
We updated the Populi API to allow Single Sign-on from your own custom web services.
Via the API, you can also pass information into Populi via your own customized inquiry form.
ISIR importer now orders imported ISIRS based on Processed Date.
Plus the usual plethora of minor visual tweaks, bugfixes, and performance optimizations.