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December 14 to December 23, 2020 Release Notes

Features & Improvements

Lots of good stuff under the tree after our recent release. Which present to rip open first?

Okay, the big one: courses now have a student view! Faculty (and other appropriate roles) can view any course as a student by clicking at the top of the course page and viewing the course as a student. Also comes with a wooden stock and a compass and a thing that tells time!

We also added an attendance kiosk option. Set up a kiosk so students can scan their IDs as they enter class. (You'll need to attach some kind of barcode-scanner to your computer—maybe use that Best Buy gift card your uncle sent you and pick one up on December 26?)

Login approvals now use passcodes generated by an authenticator app on your smartphone. This is far more reliable than relying on using text messages to send you a code. This article describes how it works, and the Populi Blog describes our thinking behind the change.

Need custom exit reasons? Now you can set those up in Academics > Settings > Exit Reasons.

The Chart of Accounts now displays , which you can click to find out what financial items and settings are associated with a particular account.

You can now direct students to the eminently-handy https://yourschool.populiweb.com/register—this page will redirect a student to her Profile > Registration view once she logs in.

Fee rules have a new option to let you trigger a fee if a student's custom field entry is blank.

Financial Aid Offered emails will now be visible in the Activity Feed to Financial Aid users.

If you're in a Group, you can now opt-out of getting notified when there's a new discussion topic posted.

Added columns for Call Number and Barcode to the Library's Active Loans export.

We use something called an Exchange Rate API to calculate stuff for different currencies. This week, we upgraded it (mostly because the old version was gonna stop working on New Year's Day)! We also have the South African Rand (ZAR) in the list of currencies.

Added a mini-calendar date-picker to the course evaluation availability dialog. Basically like getting a mini Snickers in your stocking. Or maybe a clementine.

Added a display for the number of meeting times in a term that a given course has.

Bugfixes

Fixed an issue with library resource images using http: urls from Amazon instead of https:.

Course evaluations were auto-capitalizing the first letter of each word in multiple-choice questions. Embarrassing.

Grade reports now use the term display name, which they weren't doing before.

Fixed some javascript so users could log into a Populi address in that august email program known as Outlook.

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5 Comments

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    Sam Horowitz

    Are there supposed to be some images here to show us some things?

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    Brendan O'Donnell

    Sam Horowitz Seems like there are a couple of interface icons that aren't displaying on mobile browsers. Not sure why that's happening. The Student View and Chart of Accounts items both have icons in the text, which I'm guessing is what you're missing?

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    Jason Van Vliet

    Thanks for this signification addition to Populi.  I'm sure it will be warmly received by our faculty.  Your implementation, thankfully, is very straightforward.

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    Nick Jobe

    The Student View feature is most excellent. I have already heard multiple praises from our faculty since informing them of it yesterday afternoon.

    I'd like to suggest adding "View as..." with the ability to select other (roles? unique users?) as well, across all of Populi, for admin roles or account administrators.

    Edited by Nick Jobe
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    Kerry Pretty

    I second Nick Jobe's suggestion regarding being able to with other roles and as other users. Thanks.

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