Merry Christmas and a Happy 2017 From Populi!
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.
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 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:
It's now a lot easier to keep track of discussion activity.
There are three new assignment types: essay, peer review essay, and peer review file.
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:
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 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 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.
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).
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.
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.
After releasing transcript requests a few weeks ago, we heard a lot of good ideas from our customers about how we could round out the feature. So last night we released a bunch of handy upgrades to official transcript requests:
Get all the details in the Populi Knowledge Base!
After announcing transcript requests about a month ago, we quickly realized that we needed the feature to do a better job handling requests from former students and others who don't have a Populi login. So, when the feature is released tonight (October 11), it will include a public-facing form that lets people submit official transcript requests.
Here's how it works:
To learn all there is to know about Transcript Requests, have a look at the Populi Knowledge Base!
With this release we're also loading the Profile's gear onto the funeral pyre and putting a lit torch to it. In its stead: a new menu icon, together with context-specific actions links.
What this means:
We fully appreciate that everyone clicks the gear a zillion times a day, and us changing a much-used feature will initially be very annoying. We understand! That said, the new design makes the previously-hidden actions easier to find, and the menu icon now consistently shows you the same group of actions wherever you are on the profile. It's more consistent and makes more sense than the old layout, and it clears the way for us to make additional improvements on the Profile.
A few other behind-the-scenes improvements will go out with this release, which we'll describe in our Release Notes this Friday (have you subscribed to those yet?). Of course, if you have any comments or questions about the updates, we're eager to hear from you.
Coming soon: official transcript requests! While our crack coders apply the finishing graces to them, we thought we'd give you a preview of the upcoming features.
Your students will soon be able to request an official transcript right from their Profiles. Their requests will be queued up in the new Transcript Requests view in Academics; from there you can review and fulfill them with a few quick steps. Here's the whole story:
First you'll configure a few transcript request settings.
After you've enabled official transcript requests, a student will go to his Profile > Student view. From the new Transcript Actions button, he'll select Request Official Transcript. After entering information about the recipient and handling your payment arrangements, he'll submit it.
You'll find all of your students' requests on the new Transcript Requests view. To fulfill a request, you'll go to the request's info page. There, you'll choose a layout for the transcript, preview the document, and take care of the delivery details—emailing the web transcript link or printing a mailing label for a paper copy.
A few new items accompany transcript requests. The aforementioned web transcripts create a unique URL from which an up-to-date PDF transcript can be downloaded. This is handy for when you email a transcript link in March while the student's Spring courses are still in-progress—come June, after they're all finalized, the transcript recipient can just visit the URL to see how the student fared that semester. Once you enable web transcripts, every transcript you export will contain its own unique URL in the footer.
We've also placed the utilities gear onto the funeral pyre. We'll replace it with action links and the new Transcript Actions button; the gear on the Profile > Info view shall meet a similar fate.
We're pretty excited to get Transcript Requests out to all our customers. They'll replace some pricey standalone transcript request services some schools are using. And as with all new Populi features, they won't require any software integrations or other wiring-together. Just set 'em up and let 'em rip.