A brand new homepage
The big change with this release is our new optional homepage and improved task list.
- Each course is displayed as an easy-to-read card.
- Click on the card to access the course.
- Cards are color coded and can show the teachers name/image. This is to make it easier for students to identify their courses by their teachers and find the course they are looking for.
- They will also see important updates like new announcements and tasks for the week, while teachers will see their follow-up tasks.
- Users can choose to sort their courses by last updated, last visited or alphabetically. It’s also easy to hide courses you don’t need.
- You can move a course to the bottom of the page and mute notifications.
- Another great feature is that the homepage has a high-contrast background and is now easier to differentiate from other pages in itslearning.
Improved Updates
From the home page, you can quickly jump from the courses card view to updates across all courses. At a glance see all that is most important to you with the existing stream and a new task list. The task list focuses on what is most important for students now and hides tasks far in the future. Only tasks with deadlines will be shown in this list. Tasks that have expired will be automatically removed to keep the list clean.
New Task List
You will also find the new task list on all course overview pages. In the course view, you will see tasks with no deadlines. This section will be at the bottom of the list and will be collapsed by default.
Note:
If your school/organization has selected a custom start page such as the school dashboard or calendar this will not change. However, you can still visit the new homepage by clicking ‘Home’ and making that your start page.
Self-assessment for students
Encourage more student engagement and ownership of their learning with our self-assessment feature. This is now an option in the assignment tool. Teachers just tick the ‘Require self-assessment’ box when creating or editing an assignment. When an assignment requires self-assessment, the student will be asked to assess themselves after they have submitted their answer. It will always be possible for students to write a reflection, but teachers also have the option to select rubric or assessment (grade) scales as a guide for the student to use. Teachers can access the self-assessments and add comments in the All-in-One grader.
Easier cloud file access
We’ve made it easier and quicker to add files from your Google Drive or OneDrive to itslearning. This is part of our ongoing work to improve our integration with the major cloud service providers. Just click on the green ‘Add’ button in the menu bar or in Plans to access Google Drive and OneDrive files. Fewer clicks and time saved.
Hide date/time login details
The course participant page shows the date/time of the last login of all members of the course. This includes the login times of all course teachers and course administrators. However, some organizations do not want this information to be shared with all teachers.
We have now made it possible to manage visibility of this information by administrators in each school. The setting is located in ‘Admin’ >> ‘Edit global settings’ >> ‘Features and security’, at the end of the Privacy section. The setting is called: ‘Show the date and time of sign-ins in the course participant page’. If turned off, the date/time column is removed from all courses.
Alert when students don’t receive messages
Sometimes students may have access to their messages temporarily turned off. We now clearly inform teachers who are trying to message students of this. This extends to individual and group messages with any issues clearly shown.
Even More
- We continue to improve the terminology in itslearning to better support all levels of education. Higher Education users in France will now see improvements to course terminology such as “cours” to “espace de travail”.
- In course properties, we have simplified how to change the course colors or course title.
- All users are now able to choose Chinese as their preferred language.
- We have simplified and modernized terminology and icons when uploading files from your computer or device. Upload icons now match the device you are using. We have updated the terminology for Chromebook users, too.