January 26 to January 30, 2026 Release Notes

Features & Improvements

The character-counter in course discussions now does a more betterer job of counting non-English characters. For example, a number of Irish characters were getting by undetected, and we all know those Irish characters are generally up to no good. The refreshed character-counter now gives you a firm count on all the characters in your course discussion.

The course catalog export now includes an elegant new column for course_id.

Discipline Letter layouts have an even eleganter DATE variable.

There was a time when if you removed the Library Patron or Student role from someone, you couldn't find them in Patron searches. Now the search looks for anyone who's ever borrowed something from your Library.

If you have lots of application fields with the same name, it could be hard to pull up the right field in the filter. Now if you start typing the application form's name in addition to the field, you can narrow down results to what you're actually looking for.

Bugfixes

The mobile apps had a couple text-scrambling display issues that the guys here unscrambled.

The No charges eligible for this plan message that’s meant to display when no charges are eligible for a payment plan was not displaying.

If some students in the 1098-T report didn’t have a valid SSN, and you de-selected them while also selecting other students for release, you’d still get an error about the unselected non-SSN students. Poor!

Un-hiding a hidden lesson link was not working.

Videos and Focus Sessions

• Introduction to... Populi: This one gets into setting up your Populi account, logging in, adding new users, login approvals, roles, search, basic reporting, Populi's global settings and so on. This will be most useful to Populi Account Administrator and Academic Admin users. It's scheduled for February 3rd, 2026, 11:00 AM Pacific time.
• Introduction to Academics: And this one is all about academic years, terms, programs, degrees, the course catalog, course instances, enrollment and so on. This will be most useful to Registrar and Academic Admin users. It's scheduled for February 5th, 2026, 11:00 AM Pacific time.

You have students who owe you money. You want them to pay up. But they're playing dumb. What do you do? Send them this video of Josh telling students how to make online payments.