Features & Improvements
Released a thing or two this week...
Like customizable inquiry forms! Like applications, they're now built on our Forms engine, and you can do almost everything with them that you can do with applications—conditional fields, linked fields, a new design interface, and so on. Have a look at the new inquiry form design article.
Zoom is phasing out its use of JWT apps for integrations, so we updated Populi's Zoom integration to make use of Server-to-Server OAuth apps. Put eyes on this announcement, bearing the imperative title Update Your Zoom Integration, for more details.
A couple new options for assignments:
- Pass/Fail assignments let you grade a student's work with Pass or Fail (or whatever your Pass/Fail grade scale says) instead of the usual letter/number grades.
- Mandatory Pass requires that the student pass the assignment in order to pass the course. If he flunks one or more such assignments, his Final Grade for the course goes straight to F.
You can now give academic honors a start date as well as retire them when they reach the appropriate senescence.
Likewise, when a transcript request has reached a level of senescence without being fulfilled (say, the requester is a deadbeat and has 48 unaddressed financial locks on his profile), you can Close it—you no longer need to act on it, but you still have the record of the request haunting your database.
The online payment page has graciously given payers a new Memo field. Now their payments can be accompanied by their own unique literary stylings (the new field is skewed towards creative writing—a lot of us are liberal arts guys). Let a thousand flowers bloom!
There's also a new setting that prevents people from making an online payment on a student's account if the payment exceeds the student's total balance. (It's currently set to No for everyone, but if you want, you can set it to Yes.)
Advisors can now be set to Hidden or Primary. Hidden advisors lurk like an ancient order of assassins and... no, wait, we decided not to build the feature that way. I guess it just means that Advisees can't see them (but academic staff can). Primary advisors get a star next to their names. Stars are really important to advisors.
Added some validation to make sure Canadian postal codes are formatted correctly. There's also more validation to make sure SSN/SIN fields on forms and applications end up appearing correctly.
Aid applications can now handle it when the EFC is set to Blank (instead of 0). Someone requested this functionality 10-1/2 years ago and we think this EFC thing is a just, you know, a great example that really serves to highlight how much quicker and more responsive we usually are to feature requests.
Financial reports now have custom field options in their filter conditions.
Tuned up the changelogging for when aid disbursements are deleted. Culprits will be named.
More major than everything above put together times, like, a million infinities: the People Importer can now import multiple values to a checkbox custom field if your spreadsheet supplies a comma-separated value like a, b, c.
Financial Aid > Settings has a new one that lets you hide the authorizations section from students on aid applications. And another new one that lets students authorize non-Title IV aid to be used for any and all charges (not just tuition and fees).
Course > Reporting > Evaluation has a new response rate percent indicator under each question, and Academic Term > Courses > Progress has a column for percentage of evaluations completed for each course.
Bugfixes
Term-based enrollment agreements could get tripped up by sub-terms within superterms, so we mixed metaphors and ironed out the kinks there.
Fixed an issue where a course equivalency of a course equivalency was being treated as an equivalent course on the Registration screen. While we were at it, we fixed a situation where a student could see courses he can't register for if there was a particular kind of program mismatch.
If you changed a course's units for a particular student, tuition charges wouldn't automatically adjust to the change like they was s'posed ta.
Finalized courses appeared to let you mess with a student's Incomplete status on Profile > Student > Courses. They only appeared to do so fortunately. And we like to do away with appearances when it's called for.
If you edited a student's Direct Loan award but didn't make any changes, the changelog nonetheless recorded a fictitious change.
Fixed some issues with email address validation so you can no longer save an email address like registrarofdestiny@college!
Videos and Focus Sessions
Next week's Focus Sessions will be fixated upon:
- Introduction to Running Courses gets into course settings, lessons, assignments, discussions, tests, grading, and so on. This will be most useful to Academic Admin, Faculty, and Teaching Assistant users. It's scheduled forFebruary 21st, 2023, 11:00 AM Pacific time. Maybe ask him about Pass/Fail and Mandatory Pass assignments?
- Introduction to Billing has something to say about pending charges, invoices, transactions, payments/credits, tuition schedules, fees and so on. This will be most useful to Financial Admin and Student Billing users. It's scheduled for February 23rd, 2023, 11:00 AM Pacific time.
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