February 2022

February already? We certainly have put the 2022 action plan into gear and the team has been really busy with improvements, ideas, and new functionality, features and modules. As always, please do have a look at our ideas board and submit any improvements you feel would make MySchool a better platform for your community. Even if you don't have a particular problem, then maybe others have submitted an idea that could help your school. Vote them up and our product team will pick up on this. Here is a summary of new releases over the past few weeks:

NPS (Net promoter score)

Some of our community have been included into a new initiative to help us understand how your whole community feels about MySchool. Our goal has always been to provide the best school management platform for all levels of users. This tool will help us address current needs, and gives us a valuable insight into what we can do to improve. A sincere thankyou to everyone who have submitted their feedback already. 

Direct access to knowledge base

In the quick action tool bar, we have adapted the ? to pull relevant articles relating to the current page they are viewing. The majority of our articles are available to all users within your community without needing access to the support desk. 

Optimisation of PDF's

As we promote the paperless school, we noted that PDF's were bulky and used system resources to store. The back end team have worked hard to optimise the creation and storage of our PDF's (Reports, Transcripts etc). it will have no direct impact other making things a bit lighter when generating multiple reports. If you do notice older PDF's appear with low resolution images, then contact our support team to see if there is a historic low res image being stored.

Added assessment types

Based on community feedback and ideas, we were asked if we could include a median, lower and higher quartile for a particular subject. This is different to a GPA calculation as it remains subject or course specific.

These calculations will only function with numeric assessment types. In the assessment type there are tow fields which you need to configure. How should they be calculated (subject or course), and which numeric value should be used.

School principal available in school configuration

Designed for multi school systems, we have added an extra field to the school configuration (information) page. Schools can add their respective principals, and add a signature to their respective user profiles. The system will first check this field before reverting to default settings available in the actual assessment report.

For single school instances, the behaviour will not change and remain attached to the signature defined in the user comment assessment type.

We have also introduced a new assessment type, called signature. This allows schools to either choose the principals signature or the class teacher. This is for schools who do not use the review comment field and still want to include a signature on the reports.

Merging student>student or user >user profiles

For some schools duplicate profiles were being created. Our support team now has new tool they are trialling to help reduce errors. For the moment, this tool is not available for users, but our team are more than happy to help if this does occur. We can also help assess your process to determine why these duplicates were created, to help keep your data as clean as possible.

Please note we are still unable to merge student>user profiles.

Custom field ordering

We can a have a limited amount of custom fields added to your student(others tab) or user (employment tab) profiles. The options are free text, list array, or date picker. The support team can now order these using an index function, so that you can arrange your profiles more coherently. 

Weighting per assignment type per term

If you are using this functionality, we have introduced a copy button making it easier to copy values from the previous term. This is available from the options button on the assignment grade grid.

Term management

If a course had been created with the wrong terms, these were showing as not found in the course schedule tab. We have now implemented a further check to remove these where the users are asked to check if relevant assessments and attendance data were attached. As always please contact our support team if you wish to remove terms from an active course. We can advise on the areas to check to make sure this can be done without data loss.

Contract tracing 

Further improvements were implemented here to show staff members and their contact details as well.

Take attendance

We have improved the usability of this tool to be time sensitive. For schools who take attendance for all courses, it will now adapt to your system time settings to populate with the corresponding scheduled period times. So if you are taking attendance at 9h00, it will show the period scheduled at that time, at 14h00 it will show the afternoon schedule. These are controlled by system time settings, if you notice that the periods don't match, please contact our support team to check these settings on your portal.

Bugs, improvements, and updates;

• Network schools had difficulties with custom language settings on course creation. This rule was improved to allow for no language. (EU)
• Altered not set nationality to  appear at the bottom of list in student profile.
• Network school attendance report was altered following changes.(MT)
• Network school custom engagement module had further changes improved. (MT)
• SMS estimates were adjusted to show a truer value.
• Bug fixed where students no longer enrolled in the couse were showing on grade grid.
• Changes to behaviour in continuous assessment view for assessments set to not publish.
• Improved the people picker to include donor group in the donation campaign audience selection.
• Formatting improved on new address feature in the assessment report builder.
• Issue resolved whereby assessment groups were not loading as intended in subject specifications.
• Quick report error was repaired for student address export field.
• Replacement tags are now included in programme builder bulk email option.
• Changed behaviour so that default subject scales appear first when adding assessment types or learning outcomes.
• Custom page adapted for network school to allow editing. (MT)
• Custom import for network school. (EU)
• Multiple work on tax rebate report.
• Reformatted certain action buttons on the admissions module
• Fixed an error with save as draft functionality which was not working as expected.
• Contract tracing report was failing to pull user information. This was fixed.
• Improved the questionnaire export to only show relevant consents that had been requested, and not all consents.
• Data report provided for network school for a student that had been deleted.
• Bug was fixed on student self reflections which prevented them from inputting comments.
• Custom report made available for finance module. Usable for all single schools. 
• Custom attendance lock page was fixed on network school instance. (MT)
• Work on legacy custom report card scales which were not showing correctly.
• Further works to improve formatting of course/programme names on the course resource pages.
• Custom attendance report for network school was fixed to pull correct data.
• Announcement format was changed as custom request for a school.
• Updated replacement tags in a system message that were not pulling context. 
• Fixed a bug on the VLE platform that caused returned copies to not save.
• Solved a system error on PSR report generation, due to PDF optimisation
• Fixed a problem with class level picker in the assessment report which was not functioning for network school. (MT)
• Found a bug where some contributions were not populating correctly on network school default assessment report. (MT)
• Resolved further issues with student self reflection that was showing all courses irrespective of their assessment settings.