April 22 to April 26, 2024 Release Notes

Features & Improvements

Assignments have a new setting called Release Grades. Here's a quick run-down:

• The new setting affects whether students can see grades and assignment feedback. You have three options: Yes, No, and maybe On Date.
• Yes means that students can see grades, et. al. as soon as they're posted.
• No means that they can't see them at all.
• On Date means they won't get to see them until the date/time of your choosing.
• The course final grade displayed in various places will only take released grades into account; unreleased grades will be kept out of that calculation.
• Gradebook has a new toggle for "All" and "Unreleased" grades.

Added a further—and much more strident—warning when you're about to clone course content that will demolish existing content and, more importantly, graded student work.

In Financial Aid, CPS has been replaced by FPS for the 2024-25 aid year and other aid years moving forward.

Updated some things with our Authorize.net integration to improve security and unify it with how we handle payments with other processors.

You can now set profiles to Private in bulk using the Data Slicer.

Speaking of bulk actions, you can now bulk assign new dates to scheduled aid disbursements in Financial Aid > Awards > Disbursements.

Previously, if you linked a form request to a non-user profile, that person couldn't fill out the form even if no login was required. Now all that person needs is the form's URL; No Login Required now truly means no login required.

You can now apply application discount codes via a URL parameter.

Have you deleted an exam you didn't mean to delete? Now your Populi account adminstrator can restore it from the master changelog.

Email templates now let you use HTML style tags.

Accessibility improvements in online tests: put-in-order questions can be manipulated using the tab key and up/down arrows, and make some improvements to help screen readers read online tests.

You can now customize the email that goes out when an applicant solicits an online reference.

Country codes throughout Populi have been fully-standardized. In some places, for example, you could pick US; in others, USA (among other examples). Now it's all just US.

Automations for Application Status Updated and Application Linked to Person now have a filter for Role Is/Ain't for the lead involved in the automation.

When the No Mailings thingie on a profile is checked, the person updated webhook will be triggered.

You can now look up CEEB codes for high schools for Admissions purposes. What are CEEB codes you ask? Well, if you have to ask, you wouldn't understand it even were I to explain it to you, which I'm not going to do because I want to arbitrarily exercise my agency in an effort to make a tiny dent in the universe we all inhabit.

Somewhat related: we've added fields for Former Education and made provisions for it to appear on Graduate-level transcripts.

Profile > Info > Other Info includes a new built-in field for Student Housing (as well as on aid applications) to help comply with some vagaries of financial aid housing requirements.

The Unapplied Payments/Credits report now spits out Paid By info on the export.

Nailed down some items with online payment processing that will help prevent (exceedingly rare) duplicate charges.

Bugfixes

Worked some bugfixes in, too.

Like this one! Using application discount codes with PayPal produced transactions for the full application fee, not the discounted amount. Disgusting!

Test proctoring exceptions were "all messed up", which sounds like they "didn't work". Repugnant!

Response requests for anonymous forms wouldn't send the "please fill out this form" notification. Appalling!

Videos and Focus Sessions

Focus Sessions coming soon!

• Introduction to Admissions will take a look at application settings, designing your application, processing applications, managing leads and so on. This will be most useful to Admissions and Admissions Admin users. It's scheduled for April 30th, 2024, 11:00 AM Pacific time.
• 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 for May 2nd, 2024, 11:00 AM Pacific time.

An older video, but still quite useful (and timely, this time of year): Josh Gabe's Voice tells students how to register for courses.