Features & Improvements
Do you work in financial aid and sometimes need to look up an esoteric field from a student's FAFSA? You know, the ones like "Check this box if over half your taxable income came from the sale of Pecorino Romano cheese wheels on or before the winter solstice in 2015." Well, now you don't need to fire up the government's Cold War era EDExpress software to find out. Populi is now aware of all ISIR data and can print it all too if you need a paper copy.
Do you like substituting or waiving course requirements? Of course you do. The Degree Audit now lets you substitute or waive individual degree course requirements. When you need that special directed study course to count as English 101 for just that one guy, this will do the trick.
Along the same lines, we've also added an "allow equivalencies" checkbox to course group requirements. It does about what you would expect.
Also, approved transfer credits that are attached to a course group will show up in the course group table on the degree audit now. Can you believe it was more complicated in the past? I can't.
Organization memberships can now be made private so they, along with their labels, only show up to staff and faculty and not the students themselves.
All the name fields on an application are now available in the "link to an existing field" options. Less data entry for someone in admissions. Yay!
Program Completion % is now a field in the data slicer. Nifty!
We really think you should be using Populi's built-in LMS 'cause it's totally "on fleek" as some of the kids say (or used to say). However, if for some crazy reason you really need to use the Canvas LMS, we now integrate directly with it, syncing course enrollments and users over and pulling grades back. Tight!
You can now attach files, (PDFs for example), straight to news posts.
Bugfixes
Unlinking a person from an application can be really handy, but under very specific circumstances, it wasn't working. Now it is. Whew.
If you tried really hard, you could enter an invalid assignment due date. Not anymore!
We sent the part of Populi that loads ISIRs from files to the gym. It now has beefy arms and can deal with any poorly formatted punk ISIR files you send it's way. It has no fear.
The term selector at the top of the Campus Life section of Populi would sometimes jump back to the current term as you were surfing around other terms. We applied some two part epoxy and now it's sufficiently sticky.
If you are a developer who uses the API, you may have noticed that the getPossibleDuplicatePeople task wasn't working as well as it should. It's all tuned up now though.
If you had both the academic auditor role AND the financial admin role (but NOT the academic admin role, huh?) a few things like tuition schedule management might not have worked quite right for you as of late. You can forget that happened though since it won't happen again.
An application needs to be linked to a person before it can be accepted. Now we don't let you even try to do it out of order. Why did we before?
Fixed a rare bug involving application fees. Now it's even rarer-er.
Sorting on the assignments page is now all natural and organic. That means the assignments appear in the order that you, a human being, would expect them to. On the downside, if you happen to be robot, it may not be as much to your liking.
We now include retired programs, degrees, and specializations in the data slicer. Previously these old has-beens were harder to find than a Gyarados Pokemon in the wild. Now they are as easy to find as Nidoran, but not quite as prevalent as Rattata.
Once a course was finalized, it's eval alerts were disappearing, even if the eval was still available. That's not cool so we drove back and forth over that bug several times with our minivans to make sure it wouldn't come back.
Say you had an online test with a picture of the African continent. It's multiple choice, so you say, "What land mass is this?"
A) South America
B) Africa
C) Elbonia
D) Lothlórien
But if you right-click on the image and try to save it, you will discover the file name is 'AFRICA.JPG'! Wow. What clever student would think to do that? More than a few it turns out. So now, just in case, Populi renames these files so their names appear as random nonsense behind the scenes. Take that hacker wannabes!
0 Comments