We're dropping support for Internet Explorer 8—as of January 1, 2013, Populi will no longer support that very troublesome, outdated browser.

We cut IE7 loose a few months ago (after its share of Populi logins fell below 3%), together with old versions of other browsers like Firefox 3 and Safari 3. IE8's share is currently below 5% and is falling; more people access Populi via Safari on iPad than IE8.

The takeaway: it's time for IE8 users to update your browser! New browser versions are simple to get, more secure, and incorporate improvements in speed, reliability, and compatibility with web standards. Another benefit: it helps us focus on moving Populi forward. Few things grate on us more than hacking our code to deal with some sociopathic element in IE8—especially when we could spend that time building new features or improving current ones.

So, hotfoot on over to one of these links and get updated!

Firefox

Safari

Chrome

And if you really need to run some version of IE, see what version Microsoft will let you download in your version of Windows.

Lots of our schools use Moodle alongside Populi. Moodle is a free, open-source LMS that schools can use (together with some investments in IT personnel and equipment) to run online courses, and it has some purchase among the kind of smaller schools Populi is built to serve. Even though Moodle competes with Populi, we also know that it's not necessarily a simple matter for a school to drop its investment (especially that of faculty hours) in Moodle.

So, with our latest release, we added a couple new things to courses that will let your faculty use Moodle alongside Populi with greater ease: a Common Cartridge importer and LTI links. We've posted a brief tutorial that walks you through how to use both on the Populi Knowledge Base.

The crew here put in a late night October 3rd releasing our latest update to Populi. Here's what's new...

Our top Feature Request: Course Evaluations

Populi course evaluations let you gather your students' thoughts on your courses and faculty so you can dig into the results to gauge where your school is doing well and where it can stand some improvement. Here's how it works:

First, you design your course evaluation. It's a lot like building an online test, but with a different set of question types. You can set individual questions to required or optional and to apply to the course or the faculty. After you design the evaluation, you attach it to your courses.

Then you set evaluation availability on the Academic Term page. You can make it available to your students for any timeframe, with the option to lock their grades if they don't complete the evaluation by a certain date (they unlock it by submitting the evaluation). And to help preserve student anonymity, you can restrict faculty from seeing the results—or release them only after 60% of the course's students have submitted responses. If you need to adjust the availability for a particular course, you can do that on that course's Info tab.

Then, students get alerted to submit their evaluations. Taking an evaluation is just like taking an online test.

After students submit their evaluations, the results are aggregated in the Course Evaluations > Reporting tab. The report filter lets you drill down to see evaluations from different terms, programs, courses, campuses, and for particular faculty members. You can also export the results to integrate the results with other reports.

Common Cartridge

We've also added a Common Cartridge importer to Populi courses. If your school comes over to Populi from another LMS that supports Common Cartridge, Populi can now import your assignments, lessons, discussions, links, and tests from the other system. Just click the action gear in the course Info tab, select Import Common Cartridge, and check off the course elements you wish to import. This will save your faculty the work of manually re-entering all their info stored in your old LMS.

For those who don't know about Common Cartridge, "It's a set of open standards... [that] enable strict interoperability between content and systems." That is, if you design a test in one CC-compliant system, it will work in any other CC-compliant system. If you'd like to read more about Common Cartridge, there are worse places to start than the IMS Global CC FAQ.

The Populi Knowledge Base is public

Though not actually part of our software release, it's worth mentioning that the Populi Knowledge Base is now public—that is, anyone on the internet can come read it. It makes it easier to link to articles when we respond to support requests, and it also helps new users get on board. Of course, you need to be logged in to submit a new request or suggest a new feature—but the rest of it is wide open for anyone to read.

Fonts'n'stuff

We changed the font to the more-readable and more-biggerer Proxima Nova. For an example, check out the new login screen, which now lets Populi remember your username:

Course rosters: more accessible, more handsome*

Course rosters now feature student pictures. Additionally, students can now click the Roster tab to see other enrolled & auditing students.

The miscellany

You can now accept online applications for past academic terms—up to one year in the past (useful for modular and other open enrollment courses).

Catalog courses now have settings that let you create development courses. Development courses do not affect earned credits or GPA, but do count towards enrollment figures when it comes to calculating financial aid. Essentially, they let students attempt credits without ever earning them—if your school takes Federal financial aid and gives out athletic scholarships, you know of what we speak (there's also a corresponding setting for transfer courses, too).

Bulletin boards now have a 50,000-word per post character limit, and discussions have a 250,000-word per post character limit. Start typing!

W's now show on transcripts as soon as a student withdraws (that is, after the add-drop date and before the course is finalized).

* Provided, that is, that your student ID pics look good...

We're busy prepping and testing the next major Populi release, which will feature a number of things that will improve your Populi experience. Here are a few things we thought you'd like to know about ahead of time...

New login screen

The first thing you'll notice is the new login screen and a new option that lets you check a box to have Populi remember your username. Should make logging in on your own computer that much easier.

New font

You might not notice it on the login screen, but you will once you're logged in: Populi has a new font! The new font is called Proxima Nova, which replaces old, reliable Lucida Grande. In addition to the font change, we re-did text sizes throughout Populi to make everything a little more readable.

...aaaaaaand... Course Evaluations!

Our top feature request is for course evaluations. With our next release, we're finally marking that one, DONE! Course evaluations let you create evaluations for courses and faculty, attach them to any number of courses in any term, allow students to take them anonymously, and then give you comprehensive reporting tools to help you get insight into your courses and instructors.

That's not all...

...but that is all we're gonna tell you about in this preview. We have a few more cool things that we're gonna get out there which should be a big hit with our users.

Yesterday, Microsoft reported on a security vulnerability in versions 6, 7, 8, and 9 of Internet Explorer that "could allow remote code execution", which is a nicer way of saying, "could allow someone to take over your computer".

To address the vulnerability, they list a number of complicated "workarounds" and "suggested actions", all of which seem to include continued use of Internet Explorer while it has a serious, un-patched security hole.

Since around 23% of our users choose to access Populi from Internet Explorer, we thought we'd offer a suggestion of our own: switch to Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.

We're pleased to release cross-course cloning. Academic Admins can now clone items (assignments, tests, files, etc.) from any course to any other course. For the most part, things look much the same... same interface, same red-letter warning message... but now with more cloning power than ever before!

We've been busy...

This is as good a time as any to update you on the other things we've released over the last several months. We have a nimble new development setup that lets us release new features more easily than we used to, so rather than bundling lots of little things into a few big-scale marquee releases throughout the year, we're now able to deploy several new features, one at a time, in a given month.*

Thus, this list of new stuff in Populi—some of which has been in use by our customers for several months now:

• You can now unapply individual payments and credits from invoices
• Online application fees are live!
• Global "retire" status for Programs, together with Inactive/Delete options for individual student programs
• You can now add and edit Library Loan Policies yourself
• Gradebook export: you can now export it after a course has been finalized, and it includes basic course information
• Refunds now only permitted for accounts with non-financial aid unapplied payments and credits (thus eliminating a HUGE headache for some of our customers!)
• Campus now an option for Fee Rules
• Emails sent to more than one person with the same email address now appear on all their Activity Feeds
• You can now generate a payment link to let the billing office run a credit card to pay student invoices—if a student comes into your office wanting to pay by credit card, now you can easily accommodate him
• "Close Discussions" date on Lessons
• Financial Aid Batches now have an Email Students button
• You can now accept applicants who don't have an email address
• Added course and faculty names to Course Calendar print view
• Financial Aid applications now let you track auto-zero and FISAP total income data from the ISIR

* None of this, of course, is to imply that we only work on small stuff now—we've got some pretty big things under development right now, which will also benefit from our new development/release setup...