What's New in SchoolsPLP

New Features and Improvements

This is the place to get information on what's new in SchoolsPLP. As changes are made to the system, new versions and the features they contain will be documented here, with the newest at the top, so you can scroll down the list and find all the recent news.

SchoolsPLP Changelog:

May 15, 2021

Enhancement: Added the new Learning Plan which allows teachers and administrative users to manage a course’s scheduling and personalization with just a few clicks
Enhancement: Added a Student Messaging Alert, animated notification making students aware of teacher messages for optimum engagement and collaboration
Enhancement: Now teachers and administrative users can add/edit teacher roles and rights in SchoolsPLP
Enhancement: A Printer-friendly-version button has been added in the grade editor making it easier to print student activities & grade details
Enhancement: Import SchoolsPLP content directly in schoology, canvas or any LMS

March 20, 2021

Enhancement: Added a behind-the-scenes setting to allow or disallow students messaging particular school staff, regardless of course enrollments. If customers need this, we have to set it up for them.

February 25, 2021

Bug FIX: Hide old messages in the messaging system so they don't always appear on screen

December 12, 2020

Enhancement: Added a new report for Ad-hoc Period Grades, which allows teachers and administrative users to specify a time period/range for grades.

December 2, 2020

Enhancement: Changed the SchoolsPLP messaging default to be the students on the current list instead of "all students."
Enhancement: Added the ability for users with administrative privileges to delete messages in their schools.

November 18, 2020

Bug: Fixed an issue where courses were no longer able to be sorted by Start Date in Setup mode.
Enhancement: Added the green Resources tab for Staff Members to all pages in SchoolsPLP, allowing quick access to documents with information on Printable Materials, Virtual Instructors, and AP courses.

November 4, 2020

Bug: Fixed an issue where deleted courses were still showing up in the archive in Setup mode.

October 15, 2020

Bug: Fixed the "To Grade" link that was appearing for users other than teachers.

October 1, 2020

Enhancement: Added course card icons to the student view, so the course icon picture is available as well as the text of the course title.

September 30, 2020

Enhancement: Added a GUI for the adding and editing of Staff Members and their information in SchoolsPLP Setup mode.

September 21, 2020

Enhancement: More Review settings and options are now supported in the Exam Settings spreadsheet.
Bug fix: Fixed the student player so it honors the domain inactivity timeout setting.

September 10, 2020

Enhancement: Added an icon in the student activity player table of contents to indicate when an item has teacher feedback.
Enhancement: The Assignment Settings spreadsheet can also specify the number of minutes a student views and item for it to be considered Complete.

September 4, 2020

Enhancement: Added new options to the Assignment Settings spreadsheet. Additionally, only domain View permissions are required for staff for them to be able to be assigned to any school-level courses.

August 16, 2020

Bug fix: Fixed an issue where whitespace in spreadsheets may cause errors that are difficult to notice.
Enhancements: Many behind-the-scenes fixes for speed and stability of the system.

July 27, 2020

Enhancement: Support Discussion Forums in courses by opening them in a new tab.

July 16, 2020

Enhancement: Add support for student notes to the student Activity Player.

June 30, 2020

Bug fix: Fix the "Next Activity" button/link for students.

June 10, 2020

Enhancement: Add an "Attendance Minutes" report.

June 5, 2020

Bug fix: Fix the "Your Schools" screen for users with complex permissions.

May 21, 2020

Bug fix: Restore access to the camera and microphone in the student Activity Player.
Bug fix: Fix cookie errors in Chrome.

May 18, 2020

Bug fix: Fixed a problem that caused some reports to fail.
Enhancement: Added more support for time zones.
Bug fix: Made Observers and virtual enrollments reports work with time-zone aware code.

April 26, 2020

Enhancement: Allow users with admin privileges to view staff messages.

February 28, 2020

Bug fix: Report card tables may now be sorted by Assigned and Due dates.
Enhancement: New logo now displayed in completion certificates.

February 21, 2020

Enhancement: Added start and end dates to the virtual enrollments report.
Enhancement: Added virtual enrollments by teacher report.

February 20, 2020

New Feature: View and edit Course Catalogs in setup mode.
Enhancement: SchoolsPLP login page can now display larger logos.
Bug fix: Corrected an error that caused users rights to be ignored in certain circumstances.

January 31, 2020

Enhancement: Properly marked SchoolsPLP cookies for cross-site single sign-on with new versions of Chrome.

January 28, 2020

Bug fix: Fixed some spreadsheet downloads that failed when used in a domain with no courses.

Enhancement: Added more settings for bulk change to the Exam Settings spreadsheet, including the Highlighter and other Accessibility tools.

December 10, 2019

New Feature: Added Single Sign-On support for Microsoft, Google, and other SAML-based identity providers.
Enhancement: New back-end performance and reliability enhancements added.

November 27, 2019

Bug fix: Make activity feeds work again for activity without assignment submission.

November 23, 2019

Enhancement: Help Scout communication tool enabled for all customers.

November 21, 2019

Bug fix: Correctly handle overlapping student work and multi-day events in the Student Activity report.
Bug fix: Students no longer remain logged in forever simply by checking their activity feeds for updates.

November 6, 2019

Bug fix: Students working in lessons should now be logged out properly after inactivity.

November 4, 2019

Feature: When viewing activity and progress tables for courses, teachers, and students from multiple schools, include a column with the relevant school names.
Enhancement: Modernize the header and feed layout on most pages to use CSS grids for better alignment.
Bug fix: No longer show catalog courses when displaying "teacherless" courses in a district.

October 30, 2019

Feature: Greatly increase the number of staff users who can message each other.

October 29, 2019

Bug fix: Allow more time for PDF certificate generation.
Enhancement: Allow certificate PDFs to be customized per domain.
Bug fix: Fix a panic introduced in a previous version.
Enhancement: Allow certificate PDFs to be customized per domain.

October 25, 2019

Bug fix: Typo in the student Help Scout beacon.

October 24, 2019

Testing: Enable another Help Scout Beacon.
Bug fix: Large Course Section spreadsheets were failing with a spurious error.

October 21, 2019

Bug fix: Fixed an error that caused the grade weights spreadsheet upload to fail.

October 18, 2019

Experiment: Prototype UI improvement for selecting courses for new sections.

October 17, 2019

Bug fix: Make the grade weights spreadsheet send data as it receives it so proxies or web browsers don't give up on it for being too slow.

October 15, 2019

Bug fix: Fix inaccurate time reports on the student Daily Activity tab, filtering out overlapping activity.

September 20, 2019

Bug fix: Make Gradebook export correctly report assignments marked complete by a teacher.

September 9, 2019

Bug fix: Make concurrent users report only available internally.
Enhancement: Don't limit search results for users who can view only a few domains.

September 6, 2019

New Feature: Concurrent users report.

August 30, 2019

New Feature: Completed Items report.

August 26, 2019

Enhancement: Use more secure cookie attributes.
Bug fix: Fix CSRF issue created previously.

August 22, 2019

Bug fix: The system routines now update DomainDomains properly.
Bug fix: The system routines now handle enrollment transfers without error.
Bug fix: The input function no longer starts running more often when SQS repeats a message
Bug fix: The system functions no longer hold open many idle database connections.
Expedient: Add a test login page to narrow down certain Chrome misbehaviors.

August 19, 2019

Bug fix: Show times in MST again instead of UTC.

August 17, 2019

Enhancement: Redesigned LMS sync process for better performance and reliability.

August 7, 2019

Bug fix: Show all configured weighting categories on the course settings screen.
Bug fix: Correctly mark archive domains as archived in the cache.

August 6, 2019

Bug fix: Fix a template error that prevented student course work.

August 5, 2019

New Feature: Archive and un-archive courses.
New Feature: Archive and un-archive students.
New Feature: Archive and un-archive staff.
Enhancement: Make tab displays clearer and independent of fonts.
Enhancement: Use tabs for school and district views in setup mode.
Enhancement: Search by school/district URL.
Enhancement: Search by student SIS ID.
Enhancement: Search only within the district/school you're viewing.
Bug fix: Fix search performance for people in very large districts.
Bug fix: Show teacherless courses across all schools when viewing a district.
Bug fix: Fix a sync bug related to deactivated domains that was introduced previously.
Bug fix: Don't show archived domains in setup mode's lists of subdomains.

July 25, 2019

New Feature: Simple interface for editing basic course settings.
New Feature: Change the amount of course credits a section is worth.
Enhancement: Edit student and staff enrollments on separate screens.

June 27, 2019

Disable student messaging for certain customers by request.

May 31, 2019

Track course changes again.

May 30, 2019

Disable tracking of course change signals temporarily.

May 8, 2019

Bug fix: Parent logins are no longer affected by student IP and time restrictions.

May 2, 2019

Enhancement: Make staff email addresses clickable in setup mode.

May 1, 2019

Bug fix: Users with course rights, but no domain rights can now access course setup mode.
Bug fix: Reveal X button in embedded grade editor.

April 25, 2019

Bug fix: Fix a typo in the default completion certificate text.

April 18, 2019

Bug fix: Non-gradable items now always show a grade weight of 0.
Bug fix: Course reports now allow picking dates again.
Bug fix: Dialog close buttons now work on iOS.

April 16, 2019

Bug fix: Disable incorrect autocomplete on the new student form.
Enhancement: Tone down the color of the help link and mention our support team's 800-number.

April 12, 2019

New feature: Add a "Need Help?" button allowing customer staff to send a message to SchoolsPLP support staff.
Enhancement: When viewing a message conversation with someone from another school or district, show the other party's school or district.
Bug fix: The logout and help links no longer overlap the scroll bar.

April 9, 2019

Enhancement: Add due date and total lessons to the report-card screens and exports.

March 27, 2019

Tweak: Allow logins from *.adultedplp.com as well as *.schoolsplp.com.

March 26, 2019

Bug fix: Select no one by default when choosing a list of message recipients.
Enhancement: Let customer staff reply to messages from SchoolsPLP staff.
Enhancement: Make unread messages more visible to staff users.

March 25, 2019

Enhancement: The exam settings spreadsheet now makes it easy to change the Allow Printing setting.

February 11, 2019

New Feature: Courses may now override the format of their completion certificates.

February 5, 2019

Enhancement: Students may now be re-enrolled in sections where they have an archived enrollment.
Enhancement: The login times report now merges overlapping login sessions by default.

January 25, 2019

New feature: SchoolsPLP staff can now generate enrollment-creation reports for curriculum publishers.

January 18, 2019

Bug fix: Enrollments with no activity now show up on report-card screens.

January 17, 2019

New Feature: Download settings spreadsheets for all catalog courses at once.
Enhancement: Send large change sets from the exam settings and assignment settings spreadsheets as multiple DLAP batches.

January 16, 2019

New feature: View and export report-card data for many students at once.
Enhancement: Simplify navigation between "all students" and other groupings.

January 9, 2019

Enhancement: Log sync timing better.
Bug fix: Make system signal updates.

January 8, 2019

Enhancement: Make sync-xli recover better from sync delays.
Enhancement: Parameterize and increase the minimum number of changes for the system to handle when it's under load.
Bug fix: Fix a log typo in sync system.
Disable student messaging for certain customers by request.