We're shortly to release some improvements to Financial Aid that we thought merited a heads-up:

• The aid application student view gives students a couple new tools. In the section where students can accept and reject aid award offers, they can now decrease the loan amount they wish to accept. Additionally, each award includes estimated disbursement dates.
• We've added a couple new ways to catch mismatches between the enrollment status on a student's aid application and the student's actual enrollment. There's a mismatch indicator on the Aid Applications report to help you spot such students. Additionally, financial aid users can opt-in to receive emailed alerts of such mismatches.
• Financial Aid > Reporting now includes a FISAP report that lets you export the raw data.
• The built-in Stafford Loan has been renamed Direct Loan, to better comport with what it has been called for, oh, the past five years.

These improvements, plus some behind-the-scenes upgrades, should be going live in the wee hours of March 9, 2017.

We've added a few new features to courses over the past few weeks that we thought we'd highlight for you...

Replies to replies

You can now reply to replies in discussions. So, a student comments, another replies to her, and yet another student replies to that reply. In graded discussions, the next level of replies is included in any reply-based grading criteria.

Incomplete students

We rejiggered how you grade incomplete students and mark them complete. In former times, you'd enter grades and switch the student back to enrolled all in one fell swoop. But that way of combining those actions didn't really suit our users, and change was in order.

Now you can grade assignments for a finalized incomplete student on the Student Course Summary page—and you can grade them as they're handed in, not all in one moment. Meanwhile, marking her complete (which changes her to enrolled and finalizes her grades and attendance) is a separate action. You also have options to fiddle with her pass/fail status during the incomplete phase. The new options will make handling incomplete students a lot simpler for a lot more of our users.

Miscellany: gradebook, Tin Cans, new audio player

We added a new action to the gradebook that lets you fill all empty assignment grades with 0's. It'll come in handy for situations where you have a bunch of ungraded assignments that you don't want to excuse—with one click, you can enter 0 grades for each and every one.

You can now include Tin Can elements in lessons. Tin Can is a software specification that lets learning content and systems speak to each other. If your school is using e-learning content creators like Articulate and Adobe Captivate to generate online learning content, you can export that content as a Tin Can package and incorporate it into a Populi lesson. If you require students to complete the Tin Can, Populi will wait to hear from the element as to whether the student finished before letting him proceed to the next lesson.

Finally, we upgraded the audio player so every user gets the same playback experience regardless of browser.

We updated the 1098-T report with a bunch of new features last week. Here's what you need to know...

First things first

On January 1 of every year, Populi takes all the billing and financial aid information you've entered for your students and automatically generates a 1098-T form. The 1098-T report lets you review, release, and export these forms with tools that, conservatively, save you days of work. We keep an eye on the IRS regulations and make sure that the forms Populi generates comply with whatever new rules and minutiae those industrious pencil-pushers have scribbled into existence. And with the new features, you now have more tools at your disposal to get these forms off your to-do list.

Simply put, Populi does all the rote stuff so you don't have to.

They're compliant

Submitting a 1098-T to the IRS with a bad Social Security Number is what is known in higher ed accounting as a "big fat no-no". We've done a few things to help prevent that:

• Populi flags students with no SSN or an obvious "placeholder" number (e.g. 123-45-6789). It then prevents forms from being released to students who are so flagged. Meanwhile, you know exactly who's SSN's you need to update.
• There's a new checkbox that lets you indicate that you've complied with regulation section 1.6050S-1; said regulation requires you to hunt down the Taxpayer Identification Number (usually just the SSN) for your 1098-T students. This corresponds to the newly-scribbled-into-existence checkbox on the IRS forms.
• Before exporting, you have to release the forms! Exporting unreleased forms frequently leads to a lot of sorrow and heartache, and in the interest of sparing you, we've closed that door.

They're adjustable!

Sometimes, you just gotta adjust a 1098-T. This frequently happens with schools that get started with Populi mid-year or maintain financial records in something like Quickbooks. Now you can adjust the Populi-generated values for any unreleased 1098-T right on the report, a feat that used to require a support request. Changes are recorded to preserve the audit trail, and you can even indicate a voided or corrected form using the adjuster doohickey.

They're un-releasable!

After releasing a form, sometimes you wish you could just... unrelease a form—perhaps you catch an error, or you realize the student doesn't merit a 1098-T this year. Whatever the case, in former times you'd have to get Populi Support on the horn to do such a thing. Now there's a new Hide/Unrelease function in the Actions menu that puts the task on your own timetable.

Thus, the new features (we also put out a bunch of under-the-hood improvements, too). For all the details and how-to's, head over to the Populi Knowledge Base, or fire off a question to the support crew.

From everyone here to all of you who made 2016 a great year to work at Populi, we wish you a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

We released a number of improvements to courses, including new design features for lessons, activity tracking in discussions, new assignment types, and better reporting. Here's a look:

Lessons

Lessons are now easier to design and give your faculty a lot more options for how to structure their content and control your students' flow through the course material:

• Lessons now consist of sections of material—headings, content, assignments, discussions, and files—that can easily be added and re-ordered. The new Lesson design tool works much the same way applications and course evaluations do, letting the instructor assemble various course elements as a sequence. You might add a heading and some content, then require the students to participate in a discussion—after which they're quizzed on the material the class just covered. You can even create multi-page lessons to better divide and structure the material.
• You can now set up "gated" lessons using the new availability options. When setting availability, you can keep the lesson closed off from a student until he completes all of the required materials from the previous lesson. There are also options to make the lesson available on the course start date or at a date and time that you specify.
• The new Student Progress view lets you see how far each individual student has progressed through each lesson.

Discussions

It's now a lot easier to keep track of discussion activity.

• Each comment and reply has a read/unread indicator. A blue dot next to a post indicates unread; as you scroll past they flip to an empty circle indicating read. If you need to come back to a post, you can toggle it back to unread by clicking the circle.
• Discussions now include a filter to let you see posts by Oldest/Newest, Unread posts, those with Recent activity, or those with the most activity (a comment with a lot of replies, for example).

Assignments

There are three new assignment types: essay, peer review essay, and peer review file.

• Essays give your students a WYSIWYG text editor that they can use to produce fully-formatted documents. The essays are auto-saved once every minute, and the student can return to the page at any time up until the due date (or when she submits it).
• Peer review files and essays let other students weigh in on the student's work with comments, reviews, and even grades. There are lots of options with these assignment types—peer grades, anonymous comments, among many others—giving faculty the flexibility to set up the peer review process however they like.

Reporting and some miscellany

In addition to the aforementioned Student Progress report in Lessons, we also added more detail to the time-tracking report in Course > Reporting. It breaks out the time students spend on lessons, discussions, other course pages, and playing media files. We also gave it a better filter so you can more easily sift the information.

Students can now see at a glance whether they've submitted an assignment by looking at the main Assignments view.

The course calendar has two new settings that let you control:

• How tests show on the calendar—the entire availability range, first day available, or last day available
• How many days before an assignment is due should a dashboard alert be shown to students

Moving forward

Save for a few page layout differences, your existing lessons are unaffected by the updates. To begin taking advantage of the new features, have a look at the documentation. Meanwhile, all of your existing discussions have the new read/unread indicators and the activity filter; the new assignment types are ready for you to start using whenever you wish.

We're really pleased to release these improvements—they'll make it a lot easier to conduct courses with Populi. As always, if you have any questions about the new features, get ahold of Populi Support.

We released a number of new security features last night that give your school's Populi users new ways to keep their accounts protected. Here's a look at what's new:

Login approvals

Login approvals send you a text message with a one-time use passcode whenever you log in to Populi on a new browser or device. In addition to your username and password, you enter the passcode to log in. Populi then recognizes your account as approved for use on that browser or device, and there's no further need for the additional passcode for future logins.

This protects your account by requiring you to have your mobile phone with you when you log in. Typically, the person with your phone is gonna be you—and when you enter the passcode, you're assuring Populi that the person logging in is you, and not someone else. So, even if your login is compromised—someone gets ahold of your password, say—it's useless without the passcode sent to your phone.

Account security

Account administrators can now manage all kinds of high-level security settings for your school's Populi account in the new Account > Security view. We've moved some old, familiar settings there (ID photos, who can view SSN's, et. al.), and have added a few new ones. Most important is Login Approvals, where the Account Admin can allow or require various user roles to use login approvals for their Populi user logins. For example, you might allow all users to use them, but you require it of Academic Admin, Financial Admin, and Financial Aid users.

Since login approvals require that the user have a verified text notification number, if any affected users do not have a number, they'll immediately receive an email that lets them set one up. You can also look at individual role pages to see who has a verified number and who doesn't.

User access updates

We moved the user access controls out of the Profile > Info view and stuck it next to the new menu button. Besides making it easier to see at a glance whether someone is a user, it also gives you a few new options related to login approvals. The user dialog now lets you require or disable login approvals for individual users. You can also send the user a link to reset his text number (which works just like the reset-password email).

Devices

Every user now has a new Security view in their personal account settings. Security includes reset-password fields, a chunk for setting up a text notification number, and a new Devices section that lets you view and manage your approved devices—browsers and devices on which you've logged in.

You can even set a device to trusted. On trusted devices, once you've logged in, you can stay logged in. To trust a device, you verify that it's password-protected, accessible only to you, etc. Afterwords, you're logged in on that device until you log out or an account admin changes a login approval setting.

Set it up!

The new security features will go a long way towards helping secure your school's data. We strongly encourage your school's account administrators to enable login approvals. Account administrators can read more about the new security features and Populi users can learn about their new personal security settings in the Populi Knowledge Base.