What's new in our latest release?
New Planner
Over the summer we made improvements to the New Planner as it is now the default planner in itslearning:
When opening a plan page, teachers see an overview of students’ progress without having to navigate to the 360° reports. This makes it easier for teachers to identify if some students are struggling. The number to the left indicates how many students have opened/read a resource, the number to the right shows the total number of students. To avoid performance issues this information is not shown when there are more than 99 students in a course, but can be seen in the 360° reports.
- Teachers can print one or multiple plans or topics when using the New Planner. The printing option is available from the action menu in the tabs "Current", "Past" and "Without date". Teachers can also print plans within a specific topic.
- Optionally the Planner can now be shared outside itslearning, for instance on a school's website. When people click this link, they will go directly to the topic tab.
- To work more efficiently, teachers can now use Plan actions to decide if one or multiple plan(s) should be visible or not.
New Test Tool
Starting shortly after this release, the old Test Tool will no longer be available for creating new tests. If you create a test from scratch, you have to use the new Test Tool.
Note that existing tests made using the old tool can still be used just like before. They can be edited, copied and taken by students. They will still show up in reports, assessment records and other places.
Our focus will now shift towards supporting a good migration of existing tests from the old to the new Test Tool. As of today, moving questions from an old test to the new Test Tool uses the QTI export/import. This process currently has some limitations related to rich content and test metadata, which we aim to improve over the coming months. We will not retire the old Test Tool until there is a good migration path.
Test Mode Browser
We have updated the version of the Test Mode Browser (TMB) for Windows and Mac. New minimum versions are 2.08.07 for Windows and 2.08.08 for Mac OS. After this release, old versions will no longer be accepted, and students are required to download and install the new version to take a test (download button is found on the test start page). We always recommend doing a trial-run when using TMB for tests, to ensure that all student devices are updated and work as expected.
Accessibility Improvements:
Following our ongoing commitment to accessibility and access for all, we have improved the following:
- Course Cards search results are now announced by the screen reader
- more accessible notifications and instant messages
- better contrast on buttons for "Stay logged in", Planner, Connected accounts, Workload viewer and Course Cards.
Other Improvements
- Assigning a note to specific students and groups: teachers often need to set separate work or exercises to different students based on their abilities. Now they can easily assign a note to specific students and/or groups. By default, the note will be given to all students.
Instant messages - show role: we want to make it easier for teachers and students to send their message to the correct person. When searching for people, we are now listing their "hierarchy role" next to their names.
New Plans are expanded by default: to reduce the number of clicks in the calendar, new Plans are now expanded by default. If there are multiple Plans added to an event, three will be expanded, and users can click a "Show more" button to see more plans.
- Catalan language: not long after the release we will turn on support for the Catalan language. This will be available to all customers. The Catalan language is supported throughout itslearning, with only a few exceptions such as the maths editor. These will be translated in the next release.
- For German customers only: we have added three cursive writing fonts are added to the rich text editor.