Release: v33 Peria Lamis

Transcription

1 Release: v33 Peria Lamis Summer 2016 Edition Version 33 of the My Learning Suite will be released on Thursday 25 th 15:00 GMT. This document explains some of the additional updates and features which are now available in v33. During this extensive major release, our team have focused on pre-planned features and improvements internally, and incorporated popular user requests since May 23 rd. No action will be required and your update will occur automatically between 15:00 and 16:00 GMT. Users outside of Western Europe will see changes occur within their equivalent time-zone. Learning solutions for education and beyond. Page 1 VAT no: Company No:

2 New Updates for v33.0 (N) = New Feature (I) Improved Feature (U) Upgraded Service 1: Guest Accounts (I) 2: Homework Manager v3 (I) 3: Document Marking Tool (N) 4: Editor Improvements (I) 5: Task list improvements (I) 6: Record attendance in My Learning (N) 7: New Group Management Features (I) 8: New Visual Timer for Quizzes (N) 9: New Year Group Editor (N) 10: Faster DOCX Editing (I) 11: Enhanced Calendars (I) 12: Auto-deadlines in Calendars (N) 13: Forum moderation (I) 14: Public and Private File Links (I) 15: Improved APP Logins (I) 16: Enhanced MLTV Services (U) 17: New Single-Sign-On Services (N) 18: New Far-East Server Available (N) 19: New Bulletin Service (N) 20: Revised Parent Portal (U) 21: Integration with Admin+ (N) 22: Websites more accessible (I) 23: Minor updates and improvements (I) Learning solutions for education and beyond. Page 2 VAT no: Company No:

3 1: New Guest Accounts for My Learning Guest Accounts allow your administrator to create temporary logins to My Learning whether you are linked to an MIS (Management Information System) or not. This can be especially useful if you need to create semi-permanent logins for users. Importantly, you can now create guest accounts equivalent to either a Teacher or Student role. In addition, you can also elect the date for which the account will expire. This option can be found as Administrator / Manage / User Manager / New Guest. Learning solutions for education and beyond. Page 3 VAT no: Company No:

4 2: Homework Manager (v3) In response to requests from schools who recently moved away from Google Classroom, My Learning has incorporated some suggested features from the community with regard to the latest update of our popular homework manager. Many of the changes have been made to save teachers time and effort when reviewing and marking batches of work. When viewing homework, teachers can now view, mark and grade all students work from a single page. Files submitted by students appear in a list next to the student s name and can be clicked, marked and graded from there. Any comments from students will also be flagged on this page and accessed with one click. Teachers will still be able to click on a student folder to view all of a student s work and comments together. When creating homework, teachers now have 3 options for submission type to reduce the number of homework submission buttons offered to students: 1. adding a file to the VLE 2. physically handing in the homework to the teacher 3. just saying I have completed this homework Learning solutions for education and beyond. Page 4 VAT no: Company No:

5 3: New Document Marking Tool Our new marking tool allows teachers to mark any student homework submitted on a docx file. Teacher comments and configurable marks that reflect your marking policy can be dropped anywhere into a student file. It is also possible to use the editor to mark files which you can edit wherever they are stored. When a teacher edits a document that a student has submitted as homework it is returned to the student as a new Teacher feedback file rather than the student s original submission being overwritten. It s useful to note that the new marking tool is available within any documents that you can edit, either in My Files or within any folders where you manage the content. This is ideal for commenting upon any document, for example commenting on planning or policy documents that are shared. This tool can also be used as a personal revision tool. The editor also remembers your history, meaning that you can easily go back through previous versions. Learning solutions for education and beyond. Page 5 VAT no: Company No:

6 4: Editor Improvements My Learning s statistics show that more users are operating the VLE from their tablet and we have instigated a graphical overhaul which allows the editor to operate more quickly and easily. The buttons within the editor still perform exactly the same tasks, but we have removed legacy images and replaced them with high speed glyphs and ensured that the editor will scale accordingly on tablet devices. In part two of this process, we will modify the editor so that elements of it will also operate from smartphone devices. A new addition is the Fullscreen button which will maximise any document you are editing in order to make use of the entire screen. This is particularly useful for tablets. 5: Task List Improvements When viewing files in a task list, the top bar now includes Forward and Back buttons to allow users to move between each task title, description and resources without going back to the task list every time. If the next task in the list doesn t have a file to view, only the title and description will be seen. When teachers set a task list the ability to set start and deadline dates both appear on the initial screen. The teacher can also select to add the deadline to the students personal calendars. Learning solutions for education and beyond. Page 6 VAT no: Company No:

7 If a user has 100% completed their task list then the validate checkbox is automatically ticked. All teachers have to do is press update user task lists to validate students task lists. 6: New Attendance Module We have now added a new option to hide the detailed attendance marks when displaying attendance to users. If selected, attendance will show percentage only. As part of ongoing work in this area, we are also pleased to release an entirely new Attendance Module within My Learning for any schools who use our Standard, Pro and Enterprise products. If you own these editions, you will now benefit from the ability to record AM and PM attendance for any user. This new feature also operates on tablet devices too. (See appendix A for more details on the different editions available). Phase 1 of this feature will not be visible to schools who operate a linked MIS with My Learning and this will only be available to schools who wish to take attendance separately. As part of Phase 2, we will release an update which will allow write-back to SIMS (MIS). Teachers can record attendance and this data can be stored and viewed within My Learning. Learning solutions for education and beyond. Page 7 VAT no: Company No:

8 7: New Group Management Features When managing Classes and Learning Spaces using the drop-down menu of features users are now able to click View: Homework to view homework for that class and View: Recent files and the group will ONLY show files which are recent. This is a great way of quickly discovering resources which have been added recently. The Group options drop-down menu is now available from within a class or learning space under Options. Learning solutions for education and beyond. Page 8 VAT no: Company No:

9 8: New Visual Timer for Quizzes For schools who make extensive use of our Courses, specifically the Quiz/Test tools, we ve updated the system so that if you have applied a time limit to a quiz, the platform will now display a countdown timer to students during the quiz. Setting time limit options for your quiz. Users will now see a visual countdown. As the owner of a quiz, you can click on the EDIT icon and then select Test properties to alter the visibility and timing of the quiz. Any existing quizzes that previously had timing settings will now display the countdown timer by default. 9: New Year Group Editor A popular request from schools has been the ability to manage multiple groups of students more easily. For example, it is very common in large schools to manage students by year group. My Learning have now created a Year Group Editor which allows the administrator to quickly create and populate year groups from existing classes. The advantages of creating year groups include quickly sharing content, blogs, forums or even establishing a year group website for particular needs. It is also possible to communicate to year groups and create events for them. This new feature is available at Administrator / Manage / Year Groups Learning solutions for education and beyond. Page 9 VAT no: Company No:

10 Managing year groups is a very simple operation. Administrators can assign managers and members to year groups to delegate ownership. Students can only be part of ONE year-group, and the platform will automatically remove a student from a previous year group if you add them to a new one. Another simple method of populating year groups is to edit the properties of a class, and then link it to an existing year group. Year groups can also be used in the module manager to switch modules on by year group. The My Learning People chooser, used throughout the platform, now also includes the ability to automatically select all the members of a year group. There is an added facility to send a message to an entire year group. Important: Only schools who are NOT linked to an MIS will see this new feature. If your school is linked to an MIS, My Learning will be releasing a subsequent update v33.1 to provide management of year groups automatically based upon data from your MIS. Learning solutions for education and beyond. Page 10 VAT no: Company No:

11 10: Faster DOCX Editing We have doubled the capacity of our cloud based document processing service. With more ram, higher network bandwidth and SSD drives, the time taken to retrieve, edit and upload your documents has reduced by 40%. All editions of My Learning provide the ability to directly edit Word DOCX files. My Learning will be looking to expand the tools and features available for DOCX during the next editions to allow schools to make richer use of their DOCX files. 11: Enhanced Calendar The development team have graphically overhauled the calendar system within My Learning. The display has been modified to operate on any device, and we have simplified the layout and colouring of the calendar to focus more readily on the information at hand. When viewing events by clicking on a specific day, you can now directly delete and/or edit entries in place by using the Options icon at the right of the display. Learning solutions for education and beyond. Page 11 VAT no: Company No:

12 Our new smartphone and tablet version will now display the calendar in a more suitable format: The ability to toggle weekends and manage colour categories is also much more visible. The platform will now automatically detect the location of your school, and provide either a Monday or Sunday start-of-week accordingly. Course based calendars have also been updated with new visual enhancements. 12: Auto-Deadlines Now in Student Calendars Setting a new homework item, or a new task will now allow a teacher to place deadline events directly into the students personal calendars. It will also create a link inside the event so that if they click it they will be taken directly to the task or homework item, making it easy for students to navigate to their homework or task list. Important: Please note that the ability to send calendar events is only available for the first time that you create a task or homework item. Learning solutions for education and beyond. Page 12 VAT no: Company No:

13 13: Forum Moderation Any new forum that is created will automatically be set to be moderated. Moderation can be switched off by going to Connect > Forums and clicking the pencil icon to edit the forum options. Teachers who are Managers for the forum will be assigned as Moderators. Learning solutions for education and beyond. Page 13 VAT no: Company No:

14 14: Public & Private File Links Much like OneDrive, Google Drive and Dropbox My Learning has had the ability to create links to files for some time. We have now updated this feature so that it is more accessible, clearer and easier to find links for files (should you wish to share them with external or internal users). The improved Link button now presents you with a URL that you can share, or a QR code that you can save or print. There are two types of links, Private and Public. A Private link means that whoever wishes to view the content must already be able to log in to My Learning. A Public link means that anyone can view the content without being challenged to log in. Remember that the public link ONLY provides access to the single file, and no other content. Learning solutions for education and beyond. Page 14 VAT no: Company No:

15 15: Improved App Login Service To celebrate the launch of our updated smartphone app, My Learning have also simplified the way in which you register your smartphone with the service. From any desktop or tablet edition of My Learning: Click the top right Options icon and select Mobile Access. Make a note of your App ID (split into two parts). Download the app, install and choose Sign in. Enter the credentials that were given to you. The mostly recently logged in device will be also linked to our daily push notification service so that you can receive timely updates and notices. This means that you can register multiple devices to your account, but only the most recently signed in device will receive notifications (ensuring that you don t see numerous duplicate reminders on devices you were not using at the time). Learning solutions for education and beyond. Page 15 VAT no: Company No:

16 16: Enhanced MLTV Services Our popular video conferencing service has now been doubled in capacity to support higher bandwidth and more CPU. Existing users of the Enterprise edition of My Learning will now qualify for even faster response and performance of their audio, video, whiteboard and chat collaboration services. The system has been tested with 32 real-time attendees within a single webcam conference. Schools who wish to trial MLTV (which is free for Enterprise users) can contact our support team for a 30-day evaluation of the service. It allows any Class or Learning Space to interact in a real-time collaboration environment. Prices begin at just 50p ( 0.50 GBP) per user, per year. For a reminder of the different editions of My Learning, please see Appendix (A). 17: New Single-Sign-On Services My Learning has been focusing on tighter integration with existing identity providers such as Active Directory and OpenID. As a result, our cloud based SSO server has been provisioned with double capacity in line with the expansion of our servers. We have doubled the network capacity of this single point of entry into My Learning. You will find a separate discussion on our new integration services in an upcoming 33.1 revision due towards the end of September. This document will showcase the automated authentication methods which will be available for your school. 18: Additional Far-East Server My Learning has recently doubled the performance and capacity of all its servers. Currently, these exist in the UK, Germany, UAE, India and now Singapore. With the recent release of our Singapore server we can now serve My Learning to Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Phillipines and Thailand. As a result of this upgrade, we are now taking orders for tenancy of high-speed VLE/LMS provision for schools in these regions. All My Learning servers are linked in real-time to our update channel, which transmits daily improvements and updates to your system as part of our managed service. Learning solutions for education and beyond. Page 16 VAT no: Company No:

17 19: New Bulletin Service A new bulletin service allows ML to transmit urgent messages to communities. The latest bulletins are available at the bottom left of the screen. Users will see these bulletins on any device that they log in with. The bulletins are used exclusively by My Learning to advise of essential information such as maintenance windows or important improvement changes. Remember that My Learning publish records of all their infrastructure online at 20: Revised Parent Portal The Parent Portal feature of My Learning has historically consisted of two different versions. One for desktop devices (which tablets would use too), and one for smartphone devices such as IOS and Android. Our team have spent the last 6 weeks redeveloping the portal so that it functions as a single responsive solution to work across all devices. This has the advantage of maintaining end-user consistency, clarity of use and performance across all devices (including SmartTV and consoles). In v33, we are pleased to release a parental experience which now provides more features, improved layout and faster performance. As a result of the new update, many aspects of what parents see have been improved, such as data represented in tables now being flexible so that even on smaller devices, parents will only see data which is important (as opposed to seeing all data from wider/larger displays). We have introduced a templating/theme system which will allow My Learning to inherit your individual school s colour sets and cascade them to the parent portal. Because of these new features there are now many more facilities available for parents and the same service operates on any device. Learning solutions for education and beyond. Page 17 VAT no: Company No:

18 Desktops, Laptop & Tablet edition of the account login. Smartphone account login Desktops, Laptop & Tablet homepage view. Smartphone homepage view. 21: Integration With Admin+ My Learning can now integrate with data from Rediker s Admin Plus M.I.S. Predominantly used in international and U.S schools, our platform can now read daily synchronised data from any schools who operate this Management Information System. Learning solutions for education and beyond. Page 18 VAT no: Company No:

19 22: Websites More Accessible My Learning have now made two important changes to their popular website creation tool. 1) Websites that you design using My Learning (whether for portfolio work or as functional spaces) have now been improved to be responsive for tablets and smartphones. This means that the end-user experience on smartphones and tablets is much richer and neater than in previous editions. 2) Desktop users of My Learning will now see a new tab within File Manager entitled Websites. When you click this tab, a list of any classes or learning spaces which are behaving as websites will appear. The same functionality has been added to our smartphone app and the parent portal now has an icon on the homepage to allow parents to easily find key websites. You can also access this via the Quick Links dashboard panel. Desktops, Laptop & Tablet website view. Smartphone website. Learning solutions for education and beyond. Page 19 VAT no: Company No:

20 23: Other Updates and Improvements 1) Teachers can now create group calendar events even if the option for them to post whole school events is disabled. 2) Messages sent to mail groups will now have the message sent to mail group x added to the bottom of it. 3) If a parent clicks a notification link for a child other than the one they are currently logged in as, they will automatically switch to that user. 4) Notifications now have visit location link. 5) Notifications now have a strip of colour depending on the notification type. 6) When displaying files, the bar at the top of the file has been revised to improve speed and layout. The icons which you see may be different depending on the content. 7) The Quick Links panel has been reordered. 8) BBC Bitesize video thumbnails are now being added. 9) The popup where users select their profile picture no longer allows them to leave their My Files area. 10) The Help System (Knowledge Hub) has improved results returned from searches. 11) The Total Logins report now includes members of a group who have not logged in to give the full picture of group logins. 12) The User Manager now shows the user counts for the different types of users 13) Buttons have been added to Overview Reports and Grading Centre so users can flip between the two more easily. 14) There is now an optional comments column when viewing behaviour reports from MIS. 15) Teachers can now filter course statistics by Learning Spaces as well as Classes. 16) New platform type optimised for all-through (3-18) schools. 17) Web (html) view of school reports in addition to downloading MSWord and pdf versions. Learning solutions for education and beyond. Page 20 VAT no: Company No:

21 Additional Updates - Roadmap v33.1 will be published from September 26th 2016 Moodle and CIFS (Shared drives) connector. New version of our mini-mode for SEN and Kindergarten users. Revised high-contrast mode for users with impaired vision. Customisable footer on your VLE. New types of additional data for SIMS MIS. Preview BETA of our new responsive glyph based interface. The Next Official Version of My Learning v34 Entitled Remella Remus is due in late November 2016 Ability to make an entire course public (with only login) MOOC. Cross document conversion tools (for Enterprise edition). Generate epub, PDF and HTML directly from an MLD or DOCX file. Share to My Learning feature will add content directly to My Files from any smartphone. Departmental management features. SIMS Attendance write-back for any schools using our ML Connect package. Custom icons for popular folders/classes and Learning Spaces. Release of our new interface and layout using Glyph Technology. Learning solutions for education and beyond. Page 21 VAT no: Company No:

22 Appendix A Our new range of My Learning Editions Existing schools will be migrated automatically to their closest edition before September 26 th. Please note that the Parent Portal is an additional feature which can be added to any edition of My Learning (with the exception of Web, for which it is not applicable.) Website Builder Web Website only Easy >200 users Standard >300 users Pro >400 users Enterprise >400 users File Manager MIS Integration Content Library Forms / Blogs Homework Task Manager Smartphone Apps Audio Memos Cluster Pad Chat Rooms Courses & MOOC Single-Sign-On Document Conversion MLTV Conferencing In premises hosting Virtualisation Bespoke branding Support Level + Telephone + Telephone + Chat Response Level 24 hours 16 hours 8 hours 4 hours Real-time Learning solutions for education and beyond. Page 22 VAT no: Company No: