January 2023

This release covers Dec/Jan 2022/23 sprints. Many of these improvements were taken from our ideas board, so please continue to provide feedback to the product team to help them plan improvements for the coming year.

Student photos now available on Assessment reports

In the new assessment report builder, we have added another option to the config page. A really great way to personalise report cards. Plus a great souvenir to save for future years.

Further updates on announcements audience selector (People picker)

We appreciate that our new announcement module needed time to be adapted and refined to meet the needs of our MySchool community. In one of the final updates, we have altered the audience search field to now show only active students and guardians. Further works are planned in the coming weeks to improve the module, whilst still respecting improved security functions.

Another feature implemented was to reduce the template owners to only show active staff members.

We also reinstated the My Courses audience options for course Teachers when sending announcements.

An improvement was introduced to stop inbox issues when announcement senders had been deleted. The sender will now show as a deleted user and allow for correct loading and viewing.

Top tip: Staff and student profiles should only be deleted in the case of duplicate or test data. If a staff member leaves the school then they should be set to the past employee and withdrawn from security groups, and their status set to archived. This will maintain their link to records such as announcements, attendance, and assessment activity.

We have also reworked the statistics panel to show the recipient email, as many in our community use primary and secondary emails. This will now show a complete record of all announcements sent and to whom.

Questionnaires

We have added new functionality to questionnaire export. Schools can now export student details with the MySchool UID and UUID.

Update your own file types

On the files tab of both profiles, we have implemented a new feature allowing schools to amend the type drop-down with their own categories. 

Please do not edit the signature file type as this is connected to the assessment report functionality. If the entry is grey then it has been used and will not allow for editing or removal. If the red cross appears then you can delete it as it has not been assigned to a file in your system. Use The add button to add more categories. If you wish to use a type from the selection list then uncheck the active check box.

Events manager (Enterprise)

For our enterprise customers using events manager, we have made a few changes to the UI and added some functionality;

• If a food option has been used in an event, it will no longer be possible to delete it.
• Made event type a mandatory text field. It can no longer be saved with no value.
• The event type name is unique now
• Event types once used cannot be deleted

ASC improvements

We have worked on improving the interface and its ability to detect errors;

• Each content tab will refresh automatically once an action has been logged (delete/create/map)
• Tweaked the subject creation functionality to no longer throw an error when anomalies are found. It will now simply report it cannot perform the action.
• Improved the mapping page to have drop downs instead of mapping options. The subject mapping still has a folder icon next to the field now.

Please make sure you follow the steps if you are using ASC. You first export your system settings to ASC before creating a new schedule. If term dates and timetable configuration do not match this can still cause problems.

Student/Staff birthday widget

A request from the community was to add a send announcement functionality to the birthday widgets found on dashboards. 

A slide-over appears and admins can send a simple birthday greeting to the student/staff member.

It is plain text and will not support external formatting or images. 

New appointment dashlet

We have adapted a dashlet to show users future appointments scheduled in their calendars. There is no migration planned and you should reach out to support for us to add this to your instance. You must be an invitee to the appointment for it to show on your dashlet.

Further updates/fixes are listed here;

• System - Locked status improved to trigger bad login attempts. Users are locked for 15-30 minutes before aytomatically resetting.
• System - Parent-teacher meeting pop-up was altered to allow for scrolling. Further changes were made to make pop up more user-friendly.
• System - Update to programme status to change Final status and accepted to be set to active on the DB.
• System - Updated announcement outer template to adapt to most mobile views.
• System - Updated room management to allow for changing these rooms when they are already assigned. 
• School - Bug fixed on grade report list view.
• Project (ES) - Fixed UI flow when duplicating courses to lead users to a new course rather than the original course after validation.
• Project (MT) - Solved problem where multiple approval mails were sent for a single event.
• System - Resolved a system error on the organisations field which was moved to the enrolment tab of student profiles. 
• Project (ES) - Migration script run as deleted users were causing a problem when viewing the announcement inbox.
• School - Repaired SMS send error which was due to local settings.
• System - Changed the edit locker field to allow for larger text, and searchable drop-down.
• Project (MT)  Cleaned system of ghost users.
• School - Modified custom page for reporting.
• Project (MT) - Added new programme type to programme builder.
• System - Repaired system error on course enrolment screen.
• System - Fixed assessment report footer issue which was not aligning correctly.
• Project (MT) - Detailed attendance report required for one student
• System - Aligned room management timetable printout to be the same layout as on screen.
• System (BC) - Added 2024 graduation programmes to the BC tab on student profiles.
• School - Updated transcript to pull non-numeric scales to the transcript as a primary grade.
• System (BC)  - Adapted CRS file to show subjects multiple times, the best-graded result will be the first one shown.
• Project (MT) - Moved certain class levels in the archived school level across the system.
• Project (MT) - Erro on custom language option for questionnaire module.
• School - Adapted class levels to point to a different legacy report card. Cleared other issues with formatting.
• School - Fixed error from a specific custom report which was not generating as expected.
• School - Fixed issue with the graduation programme not showing for BC reports.
• System - Amended cell format when using topic folders on the assignment grad grid. These will now be replaced with mouse-over icons.
• System - Student label information in the assessment report section types was improved to show the replacement tags in alphabetical order.
• School - Grade report publishing encountered problems whn large groups were selected. This has been optimised to allow for this.
• System - Aligned font type and size on the guardian portal to conform with the system.
• School - Updated invoice payment details on invoice.pdf
• School - Data cleaning after making changes to custom fields caused entries to be lost.
• Project (MT) - Repaired IEP PDF output to include the year in the footer.
• System - Student schools previously attended were amended to conform to the new UI, and dates now save as expected.
• School - Fixed legacy finance PDF print out which was not functioning.
• System - Repaired announcement stats calculation which was false.
• System - Imroved assignment correction submission for use on mobile devices.
• System - Updated schedule note pops up to be able to copy the text. Due to the legacy system build.
• System - Changed the format of buttons in the admissions workflow to conform across browsers (windows)
• Project (MT) - Updated custom attendance page to take into account student enrolment dates as well.
• System - Added permission to view and edit with override possibilities. These are added to the user profile permissions.
• Project - The custom attendance report was adjusted to ignore a specific attendance status.
• School - Bulk update of records for BC grad requirements
• Project (MT) - Changed font in a custom report to adapt to Maltese characters.
• System - Reworked assessment report ordering to be alphabetical
• Project (MT) - New IEP module was showing withdrawn students from previous years. This was changed to only show active students.
• Project (MT) - Investigated grade report publishing page which was hanging when multiple class levels were published. 
• School - Problems with inactive terms showing on the transcript. This was fixed.
• School - Changed logic on AES report card with regard to attendance stats.
• School - Changed invoice wording for PDF.
• School - Repaired credits which were showing on the transcript when they were not allocated to the course.
• System - Amended logo on Id cards to be 125px * 30px maximum. System images will be reduced to fit these parameters.
• System - The attendance and assignment widget was adapted to include lessons scheduled on a weekend.
• School - Fixed missing interim grades which were not showing on the transcript.
• System - Course list bulk actions now include periods and lessons so that schools can update these easily.
• System - Reworked assess grid as long texts were affecting format issues. These will now be replaced with a mouse-over note.
• System - Fixed donation ordering to filter ascending/descending correctly.
• System - Fixed an issue whereby learning outcomes were only showing if a grade was added. This ignored the subject assessment sections. It now respects the configuration settings.
• Project (MT) - Worked on sync issues for custom API.

Sprint 157