We are also proud to release a brand new attendance system for all customers, a new progress report and a number of new features and improvements to the dashboards. Click the links below to read more about the news!

• We make the start of the school year easier!
• New attendance system
• Dashboards and parents – new features
• New progress report and completion criteria
• Miscellaneous other news and changes

Copying course elements

It is now possible to copy elements between courses without copying participants, answers and submissions. This simplifies the reusing of courses, and teachers no longer have to spend time cleaning up old reused courses. Uncheck the Include answers and submissions box to copy elements without participants, answers and submissions connected to them.

Importing and exporting links

This nifty little feature allows teachers to export and import course links as a bookmarks.html file, thus making it easy to reuse links in different courses, or import bookmarks and favourites from your browser – for example Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Script for end of school year

In order to reduce the end of school year process, a script has been made that stops all SIMS integrations on a site and start them again later. The script breaks all current hierarchy synchronisations and creates a new start hierarchy for the school's synchronisation with SIMS.

The video shows how the attendance system can be used by teachers, mentors, learners and parents.

The new features for this release include:

Managing and registering planned absence for learners

Learners can now inform teachers about planned absence in advance. This is time-saving for teachers who no longer have to spend time searching for reasons for scheduled absence. The learner registers the absence by clicking ePortfolio >> Attendance >> Register absence:

Teachers see the notifications from the learners as comments in the attendance overview.

Feedback on attendance

The comment/feedback on attendance function is slightly changed. To make the interface more efficient, the old interface is replaced with a new interface with a comment column to the right of the attendance table:

Comment logs

All comments are shown as a log when you click the comments icon. It is possible to hide comments from the learners. Learners, mentors and teachers are notified about new comments through the internal messaging system and thus also on the main dashboard. The images below shows the comment feature from a learner's view.

Class length in course timetable

Course teachers and mentors can now edit the class hour length (in minutes) in the timetable setup. As a result, the attendance reports now include minutes in addition to hours.

Showing two absence rates

It is now possible to show two absence rates: Whole term and Completed class hours. The first shows the total absence for the term, while the latter shows the percentage and number of class hours that are actually completed and submitted.

Notification letters

From the attendance and behaviour systems it is possible to create letters with behaviour or attendance notifications that can be printed and sent to a learner's parents. The report is usually sent when a learner has shown unacceptable behaviour or has a high absence rate. The letters easily generated, and they are saved in it's learning as a reference for later.

Teachers and mentors are allowed to edit the template text when new letters are created. The addresses of the school and learner are automatically inserted into the letter – if address information is saved in it's learning.

The notification letters are available for course teachers in the attendance and behaviour reports in Status and follow-up, and for mentors from under the mentor tab. The letters are created in it's learning, saved, and then printed and sent to the parents who signs it and returns it to the school.

Read more about attendance in the help!

Aggregated content blocks
A number of aggregated content blocks, allowing users to add content blocks to their personal dashboards, hierarchies, courses and parent dashboards are now available from the add content block pop-up.

Because of the increasing number of content blocks have changed the way the content blocks are organised. There are now two tabs in the add content block window: 'Create' and 'Aggregated'. 'Create' content blocks have content created by the person setting them up, such as files, images, links and rich content. Under the 'Aggregated' tab you find content blocks that are generated by the system or other user, including activities from the calendar, completed activities, e-mail, and internal messages. This allows for more flexible dashboards and information flow.

Tip: When you have logged in to it's learning, click My dashboard in the left frame. You can now set up your own dashboard and fill it with the content blocks you want.

Course progress content block
A learner's progress report can now be added as a content block to the course dashboard.

Parent dashboards

ILP and attendance content blocks
New individual learning plan and attendance content blocks are added to the parent dashboard. The ILP content block shows a progress overview of the child's current plans with link to the plans. The attendance content block provides parents with an overview of their child's attendance.

Content block administration
Different schools may have different practices of parent involvement. To allow schools to customise the parent dashboards, it is now possible for administrators to define the positioning of the content blocks for the parent dashboard. The feature is located under the Administration tab >> Edit global settings >> Manage user summary dashboard.

Each element is represented by a section in the progress bar, and there are four colour codes based on the status of the task:

• Grey: Open (not started)
• Green: Completed
• Red: Past deadline
• Yellow: Deadline within a given number of days

Links to both the old and the new progress report can be found in Status and follow-up.

Course completion

A course teacher may now define other course completion criteria than 'All activities completed'. This allows for a more flexible way of course completion. The course completion settings allow you to define the completion criteria for progress report. Click Settings in the top right corner of the progress report to edit the course completion settings. There are three course completion criteria: 'All mandatory activities', 'A number of mandatory activities' and 'A percentage of the mandatory activities'.

Learner: Join existing activity group When entering a group assignment, a learner has the option to join an existing assignment group. Existing members of the group are notified of new members via the internal messaging system. This allows a teacher with, for example, 60 participants in a course to hand out an assignment and tell the learners to organise themselves in groups of, for example, four.

Teacher: Manage groups
A course teacher now has the option to manage assignment group memberships by removing or adding participants.

Send messages when group members perform an action
Whenever a group member or a course teacher performs a group action – such as participants leaving or joining a group or teachers editing or deleting answers – other group members are informed via the internal messaging system.

Mini pop-up in assignment participant list
When a single name is selected in the assignment participant list, a mini pop-up window with user information is shown. The purpose of this is to make it easier to distinguish the participants from each other – for example participants with similar names. Tip: In long lists, use the keyboard and enter the first letters of the name. This automatically scrolls the list.

Test 2.0

Completion criteria
It is now possible to define completion criteria for a Test 2.0. A completion criterion is a percentage that must be reached in order obtain a 'Completed' on the progress report.

Status and follow-up

Logging of assessment status changes
All changes to the assessment or status of an activity are now logged. This provides administrators and teachers with a transparent view of changes to an activity. By logging this, it will not be possible to tamper with these statuses, and teachers and learners will have a higher degree of security.

Plug-ins

Dynamic placeholders
A new feature allow developers to specify the URL of the placeholder image to show more correct information in the rich text editor when editing.

Editing plug-in content
In the editor it is now possible to right-click and modify content previously inserted with a plug-in.

Plug-ins as content blocks
Users are now allowed to add plug-ins as content blocks on dashboards.

Permanently deletion of courses with behaviour remarks

It is now possible to permanently delete a course with behaviour remarks. The behaviour remarks are not permanently deleted, and are still available in the behaviour reports.

Administration

Terminology change: eSafety
To avoid misunderstandings, eSafety is now called ‘Privacy’.

Policies
Restrictions are added to the administration user rights when creating and editing policies. This is to prevent users from giving themselves unlimited access and override their own profile.

Address for organisations
It is now possible to add an address for organisations when adding and editing hierarchies. The address is used in the notification and warning letters in attendance/behaviour, and it will also be included in future functionality, so make sure you enter your organisation’s address in Administration >> Hierarchy >> Edit hierarchy.

Session length tracking
It is now possible to track the session length. This enables us to see how long the users are logged on, and detect when a user is no longer active. In Administration >> Users and access rights the column entitled 'Last online' is now changed to 'Last log in'.

This change is especially important for customers in the American market who need to document the length of the students' logged in sessions. Our consultants can create reports on this if needed.

Postini

We have created an automated organisation of Google's e-mail filtering service Postini.

New font in rich-text editor

In order to support polytonic Ancient Greek letters, Palatino Linotype is added as a new font in the rich-text editor. Computers without Palatino Linotype installed will see the text as Arial when Palatino is selected.

The world moves on …

Discontinuation of old editors
The ActiveX and Java Applet editors are discontinued. This is because the rich-text editor works on all supported platforms and browsers, and is generally considered a better editor.

Discontinuation of the old attendance system
The old attendance system is discontinued. A new attendance system has been developed and replaces the previous version. If you want to retrieve data from the old system, please contact our helpdesk.

Discontinuation of Test 1.0
Compared to Test 1.0, the newer Test 2.0 is a more powerful tool and thus renders the old test tool superfluous. As a consequence it will no longer be possible to create new tests with the old test tool. Existing tests made with the old test tool will still work.

Course administration: The tip box that was introduced after the previous release is removed from the course administration page. The 'Enrol me' function also performs better.

Early learner interface and plug-ins: Plug-ins with licensing now works in the early learner interface.

ePortfolio/assessment portfolio: The ePortfolio and assessment portfolio can now be accessed with both short name and www in the URL.

Test 2.0: When assessing tests and the 'Ok – Next student' button was used; the user was redirected to at test which was already assessed. This has now been addressed.

Test 2.0: It is now possible to import and export questions in test 2.0 again.

My library: Users with æ, ø, å or other special characters in their first or last names were allowed to share content in My library, but their content could not be accessed by other users. This has now been addressed.

Parent dashboard: Some users reported that the parent profile was not created if the parent function was enabled. This has now been addressed.

Parent dashboard: Translation of 'Open' in the parent dashboard is now correct for Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk (changed from Åpen to 'Åpne').

Behaviour – permanent deletion: Permanently deleting courses with behaviour remarks now works. The behaviour remarks will still be available.

Users – permanent deletion: Permanent deletion of users now works.

CSV import of users: CSV import of users now works for sites using policies.

Projects: New projects are now saved to the correct organisation.

Customer skins: Fixes for dashboards in the customer skins.

Applications: The URL in the tip box on the add applications page did not work. This has now been addressed.

Internet Explorer 6 warning: Some users have reported seeing the Internet Explorer 6 warning with different browsers than Internet Explorer 6. This has now been addressed.

Hierarchy spring clean up

Sites and administrators are already notified about the forthcoming hierarchy spring clean up. The following actions will be performed:

• Restrictions on hierarchy type:
  • Only the root hierarchy can be defined as a site
  • A school cannot be placed under a school
• A local administrator at a school can no longer see users on other schools

School autonomy

The idea behind school autonomy is to make the schools more independent from each other – for example if a site consists of a local authority with several independent schools.

As a result, administrators are now only allowed to see and manage courses and mentors in the organisations in which they are administrators. Mentors are only able to see elements – such as users and ILPs – at their own hierarchy level.

When managing projects, administrators are only allowed to see projects in the sites or schools in which they have 'manage projects' permission.

It is now possible to add a hierarchy level to a courses and projects. This allows courses and projects to be filtered or displayed according to organisation, for example 'site' or 'school'. When a course is imported, the school is assigned automatically. Site administrators can filter policies by organisation level.

When a local administrator enters a site with school autonomy enabled, only elements from the local school are shown in Administration >> Trashcan.

eSafety

Others are renamed to Guests in eSafety.

Show dashboard and main page simultaneously

The main page is discontinued and replaced by the dashboard 31 December 2010. Administrators are notified about this in a message in Administration >> Profiles. To provide administrators with time to move content from the main page to the dashboards, it is now possible to display the old main page and new dashboard simultaneously. To enable both the dashboard and main page for a profile, click Administration >> Profiles >> Edit profile, and check the Main page and Dashboard boxes under Profile functionality.

Teacher task list

The task list for teachers which was missing from the course dashboard after the last release is now available as a content block.

Task list for students via REST API

An API is created where portals can retrieve a list of tasks for a specific user. Supports paging.

Beta functionality

If new functionality is tagged as in beta, users are allowed to provide feedback on the functionality. The feedback is automatically sent to our idea portal – via Google translate if users choose to comment on languages other than English.

Lynchpin

An important milestone has been reached as Lynchpin is now officially certified and integrated with it's learning. Lynchpin is an interoperability system that moves data from a school's MIS system, and automatically creates amends, populates or delete accounts in it's learning. It also has the ability to work with other SIF compliant online systems. Read more about Lynchpin.

Behaviour

Behaviour is enabled for all customers. Teachers and mentors can now delete incorrect behaviour remarks, or flag them as erroneous.

Individual learning plans

Mentors are now allowed to have several different current plans for each learner, and have one progress bar visible for each plan.

Discussions

It is now possible to add an introduction to discussions. This allows teachers to provide introductory comments or questions when adding discussions.

Test 2.0

A new feature makes it possible for teachers to change manual assessments in test 2.0 at whatever time.

Espresso

Until now, Espresso has been available for all sites in the UK. It is now possible to enable or disable Espresso via a site setting. In addition it is possible to grant students access to Clipbank and Espresso content. If enabled, Espresso and Clipbank are available as a content block.

IMS/ES

The performance of readPersonForGroup and readGroupsForPerson is now radically improved. As a result, the number of timeouts will hopefully be reduced.

Hierarchy distribution lists

Users are now provided with an extended amount of distribution lists.

Cloud e-mail

The itslearningmail.com domain is discontinued and replaced by edumail.org. Schools can have edumail.org enabled by request. The edumail.org domain does not support filtering on reading.

Internet Explorer 6 and other outdated browsers

As previously mentioned, we will discontinue support for Internet Explorer 6 and other older browsers. Users on these browsers will now see a message in the interface asking them to upgrade.

TV 2 Skole

TV 2 Skole has been discontinued and is removed from it's learning.

Extensions

Vendors can now use rich-text in the long description metadata field when adding and editing extensions. It is also possible to add volume licensing for schools or sites in different markets. Example: Set a price for 0–9999 users, but give a discount for schools or sites with more than 10 000 users.

Corrections

Almost 150 bugs are addressed. Click here to download a PDF document with all the fixes.

Engage the parents!

The first version of the parent dashboard is finished and released in beta. Our goal is to provide the parents with an overview of the child's school work, development, behaviour and presence – a combination that will enhance the home-school communication.

Although still under development, parents are allowed to log in to it's learning and access an overview of their children's planned and completed activities, courses, personal reports and lesson plans.

A little manual work is necessary from the system administrators before parents can log in: Enable the parent dashboard, add parent users, and assign parents to the learners. See the help for more information.

The first version includes ten features:

• New global setting: Allows system administrators to enable or disable the parent module.
• Profiles: New profile setting for parents.
• eSafety: The fixed eSafety rules are updated to cover the parent relationships.
• Mentor menu: A new Parents link is added to the mentor menu.
• Mentor: A new child-parent overview is created for the mentor.
• Individual learning plans: As a preparation for the upcoming ILP content block, mentors can now make certain information from the ILP visible to the parents.
• Administration: Administrators are allowed to add parents to a learner.
• Parent user import: Possible to import parents via CSV files.
• Child dashboard: A dashboard is created for each child, containing the most important information parents need to know about their child's education and school life.
• Parent content blocks: The following content blocks are available:
  • Planned activities
  • Completed activities
  • Course list with links to personal reports and lesson plans

The child dashboard as seen from a parent's perspective (click the picture for a full-screen view):

The mentor menu:

Read more about the parent dashboard in the help!

My library is available as a new tab, and provides teachers' with an overview of their elements. Currently only pages can be added, but more elements will be added later on.

The most important we have accomplished with the first version of My library is to allow teachers to reuse their own content in multiple courses. A teacher can now add the same page in 20 courses and update it in all courses with a few clicks in the library. This is incredibly time-saving!

Elements created in My library can be shared on three different levels: school, site and community. The last option allows you to share your content with all it's learning users across the world – regardless of site. We encourage teachers to create content that can be reused globally! Content from other users can be found by clicking Add content from My library while in a course, and search for content.

Read more about My library in the help!

To speed up development, enhance security and improve the user experience we plan to begin phasing out support of Internet Explorer 6.0 and other outdated browsers on 1 July 2010. Certain functionality within it’s learning may not work correctly in these older browsers when we stop supporting them.

We know that some of you still use Internet Explorer 6.0, but be aware that this browser for a long time has been considered an antique – even Microsoft recommends their users to upgrade. New browsers such as Internet Explorer 8.0 and above and Firefox 3.6 and above are more secure and have the built-in technology you need to get the full potential of it’s learning.

Starting in March/April, users on these older browsers will see a message on the login page explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser.

Users who continue using these browsers after 1 July 2010 log in at their own responsibility.

To avoid any problems, we recommend you to upgrade to one of the following browsers:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer 8.0 or higher
• Mozilla Firefox 3.6 or higher
• Safari 4 or higher
• Opera 10 or higher

Click here to find out what browser you have.

It is important to define the root hierarchy as a Site. You should not add a site under a site. The organisations for which you want to add terms, policies and eSafety rules must be defined as School or Site. The logical rule is: one site, and several schools within that site, but not several schools within a school. In the example below Downhill LA is the root hierarchy and has the hierarchy type Site. The schools below – Chesterson and Enfield – are added as schools.

If schools have sub-hierarchies, for example classes, they should have the hierarchy type Class, while groups within the class should have the Group hierarchy type. When the hierarchies are set up with the correct hierarchy type as illustrated below, eSafety, policies and terms should work.

Note: Below a hierarchy defined as School you can have hierarchies defined as Class, Group, and Not defined.
 

 Read more about eSafety, policies and terms in the help!

Due to the amount of new features the blog entry for this release is divided into four parts.

• eSafety and Policies
• Attendance 2.0 beta, Behaviour beta and Terms
• Software Development Kit
• Other changes (see below)

Course dashboards and page tool

The course dashboards and page tool are now enabled for all users. The functionality is described in this blog entry and in the online help: dashboards and pages.

Better performance

We are taking several initiatives to improve global performance. It is now possible to store static files, such as images, on a content distribution network (CDN). This means that the files are located closer to you, and enables faster loading of it's learning. The CDN is enabled for all sites within the USA. We are also working to get rid of the evil frames – in the next release, perhaps?

Personal storage space quotas

After the update on 7 January the personal file storage quota is removed from individual users to policies. As a result, users who have been granted individual quotas are given the same storage quota as normal users.

To grant different storage quotas to individual users, administrators can create a policy for the users they want to grant a different storage quota. It is only possible to have one storage quota per policy. If you want to grant some users with 1 GB storage and another group 2 GB, two policies must be created. We have already created a policy for users with no personal storage space.

Read more about policies in the help!

Diglib

We have created a new blog for the Diglib updates.

 Read more in the Diglib blog

Minor changes

SCORM: SCORM resources can now be imported as a single resource or split into multiple resources. The second option is new and allows the content to appear as multiple links in the navigation tree, based on the structure of the SCORM package. Teachers can insert the individual links in, for example, the planner.

New web 2.0 plug-in: Norwegian customers can now embed videos from NDLA (Nasjonal digital læringsarena) in the rich text-editor.

Individual learning plans: It is now possible to delete an individual learning plan.

Dashboard as a landing page: If dashboards are enabled for your site, you can now select the different dashboards as landing pages for a profile under the Administration tab >> Profiles >> Edit profile >> Start URL. A landing page is the page users see when they log in.

DirectEdit: A new version of DirectEdit is included in this release. You are automatically asked to install the new version the first time you use DirectEdit after the release. In addition to fixing some bugs, the new version has better support for Open Office applications. Administrators that have to install DirectEdit manually on their organisation's computers can download the MSI file here.

Note that there is a known issue connected to DirectEdit and Microsoft Office when 'Protected mode' is on.

Planner column width: Column width is adjusted in the planner.

Welcome e-mail: Some of our users have experienced that Hotmail marks the welcome mail from it's learning as spam. We have now reduced this possibility.

SyncID: You are now allowed to see (but not edit) the SyncId in the Manage Enterprise web services and Edit hierarchy pages.

Google and Postini: It is now possible to edit the Google Apps credentials in the Google administrator interface in it’s learning. It’s also possible to add Postini credentials here. Enabling and adding the correct credentials automatically creates students, teachers and guests groups in Postini and assign the users correctly.

Enhancements

• JavaScript error in 'Min Arena': Users trying to connect to it's learning through 'Min arena' got a JavaScript error if using Internet Explorer. This has now been addressed.
• Perform for all: When using the 'Perform for all' functionality in Administration >> Users and access rights, the changes affected all users, and not just the search subset as expected. This has now been addressed.
• Course content blocks: The course content block was not showing in all courses. This has now been addressed.
• Conference: If a user was in a conference and then navigated away, an error message appeared saying the user is already connected when the user tried to rejoin the conference. It also took some time before users that logged out of it’s learning were removed from the conference. This has now been addressed.

Administrators can now configure the users' visibility and communication settings for a site – in it's learning, these settings are called eSafety. Some rules are configurable, while others cannot be edited.

In short, the settings decide:

• who will find users in searches.
• who users may communicate with.
• who users may receive communication from.

With eSafety you can, for example, prevent learners from sending and receiving messages from staff at other schools.

eSafety is a profile setting managed from the Administration tab >> Profiles >> Edit profile.

Read more about eSafety in the help!

Policies

A policy is a collection of profile settings that can be assigned to profiles or individual users within an organisation – such as a site or school. Policies override the default profile or user settings. You are allowed to combine settings of different types in a policy, as well as assign multiple policies to a profile or user.

With the introduction of policies, you no longer have to edit existing profiles or create new profiles if you want to change the permissions for a set of users. This creates a more flexible system, allowing schools to have their own rules, independently from the rest of the site's schools.

How does it work?

Let's use an example to illustrate the usage. In a hierarchy with four schools – Chesterson, Springfield, Whitneyville, and Enfield – Chesterson has experienced that a group of pupils have been bullying others through the internal messaging system.

To put an end to this, the headmistress at Chesterson decides to turn off internal messages for all pupils. She asks the system administrator to disable the messaging system for the Pupil profile, but he is reluctant. He points out that editing the profile would disable the messaging system for all pupils in all four schools, and, knowing how extensively the messaging system is used by the other schools in the hierarchy, he argues that this is a really bad idea.

Instead, the system administrator asks the headmistress to consider using policies. He argues that the best option is to create a policy and assign the policy to the Pupil profile at Chesterson or – optionally – to individual pupils of the school. The last option would efficiently prevent only misbehaving pupils from using the messaging system. The headmistress agrees, and, instead of blocking the messaging system from all pupils at Chesterson, Springfield, Whitneyville, and Enfield, the administrator simply suspends the privilege for four individual pupils at Chesterson School.

Read more about policies in the help!

Important about hierarchies and the new functionality

In order to allow adding terms, policies and eSafety rules, the root hierarchy should be defined as a site. The organisations for which you want to add terms, policies and eSafety rules must be defined as schools or sites. You should not add a site under a site. The logical rule is: one site, and several schools within that site, but not several schools within a school.

Hierarchies are edited from Administration >> Hierarchy. Select the correct type from the Hierarchy type drop-down list, and click Save.

Forget everything you know about the old attendance keeping system – we now introduce a brand new attendance platform. Our efforts have been focused on making the attendance keeping as efficient and simple as possible. The new system has keyboard shortcuts, supports tabbing, and features a new and intuitive user interface. Presence is automatically kept.

Both teachers and mentors are allowed to keep attendance. Teachers keep attendance at course level, while mentors manage attendance for their groups.

New reports and day and week overviews facilitate early detection of problems connected to absence. The reports show information such as attendance statistics for individual learners or courses and calculate absence rates.

To help reminding the learners of the importance of attendance and participation, we have made it possible for them to follow their attendance across courses under the ePortfolio tab.

The new attendance keeping system is based on two new concepts: Attendance categories and attendance codes for easy grouping of the attendance. Organisations are allowed to decide their own codes and categories.

Attendance 2.0 beta is enabled for all customers in the primary and secondary segment. Sites using the old attendance system must contact our support in order to have it enabled.

The next step in the development of the attendance system will be to add support for exporting to Management Information System (MIS).

Read more about attendance in the help!

Behaviour beta

The new behaviour tracking is a tool for keeping track of positive and negative behaviour. Both mentors and teachers can keep behaviour, and the learners are presented with reports of their conduct. It is possible to add your own behaviour types, and use weighting to grade the behaviour. Behaviour is enabled for all schools belonging to the primary and secondary segments.

Note that the behaviour system is not fully translated to all langugages and English texts may appear.

 Read more about behaviour in the help!

Terms

Administrators are now allowed to add terms to the organisation. A term is usually the time during which the organisation holds classes, sometimes called 'semesters', 'quarters', or 'trimesters', depending on institution and country.

The first features to use terms are the new attendance and behaviour systems, but in the future we will include it in other functionality.

 Read more about terms in the help!

Important about hierarchies and the new functionality

In order to allow adding terms, policies and eSafety rules, the root hierarchy should be defined as a site. The organisations for which you want to add terms, policies and eSafety rules must be defined as schools or sites. You should not add a site under a site. The logical rule is: one site, and several schools within that site, but not several schools within a school.

Hierarchies are edited from Administration >> Hierarchy. Select the correct type from the Hierarchy type drop-down list, and click Save.

If you have an idea for a new learning tool in it's learning, you should consider making it yourself – or hire a developer to do it! Our SDK program has been running for a while, and a skilled developer can add both applications and plug-ins to your it's learning site. New in this release is support for plug-ins, countries, languages and licenses.

What is a plug-in?

Plug-ins are small tools you access from the editor's Insert button.

What is an application?

An application is a learning tool that can be added to courses and projects from the Add page, just like the tools you know such as notes, tests and assignments. Applications are more advanced compared to plug-ins, and can support assessments, reporting and feedback.

Fictional example of a plug-in

A user clicks the Insert button in the editor, and clicks the Atekst link in the drop-down. The user is directed to Retriever's Atekst database of newspaper articles. The user search for an article and clicks the Add to it's learning button. With a simple click of the mouse the news paper article is inserted directly into the editor.

Countries and languages

When adding new plug-ins and applications you are allowed to add support for different languages, and decide which countries they should be available in.

License details

It is now possible to add licenses for applications and plug-ins – for example decide whether they should be free or licensed. If licensed, it is possible to add pricing information.

 Read more at developer.itslearning.com!

The pages module and the content blocks added to the pages will not be available during the update, but the rest of the course content will be functioning as normal.

All content which is downloaded from Diglib prior to the update will work, but during the update you are not allowed to add new resources to courses. Publishers and vendors cannot add resources.

As of yet, not all customers have access to dashboards and pages. You can check whether your site is affected in this list.

DirectEdit
A new version of DirectEdit is included in the 7 January release. DirectEdit requires a file to be installed on all users' computers. This will normally happen automatically, but some schools restrict the user's access to install files on the computers. Administrators having to install DirectEdit manually can download the MSI file here in order to prepare the computers for the new version.

To reactivate a content block, deactivate one of your active content blocks by clicking the X in the topmost corner of the content block.

Then click Add content block >> Reactivate content block.

Select a deactivated content block from the drop-down list and click OK to reactivate it.

Did you know?
Cut & paste: Did you know that you can move a content block from one dashboard to another? Use the scissors icon to cut the content block you want to move. Enter another dashboard, click 'Add content block' and then 'Paste files'. The content block is now cut from the first dashboard and pasted into the other.

Drag & drop: You can also drag and drop the content blocks around the page. Place the mouse cursor on the blue header of the content block, left click, drag it to the desired location, and drop it by releasing the button. Not all users have this opportunity, but it is always possible on My dashboard.

Note: This update only applies to the customers that have enabled dashboards and pages.

The Java version of the SDK wraps the REST API for applications in it's learning. It also contains a sample application to illustrate the usage for Java developers. The Java SDK is a ported version of the C# SDK. Currently we have SDKs for Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5. and Java 1.6 (JDK 6).

The SDK makes it easy for developers to get started developing applications for it’s learning as it simplifies the authentication between it’s learning and your application. We hope the Java SDK proves useful both for experienced an inexperienced Java developers. One of the main principles behind the SDK is to save time for developers – we want to make it easy for you to create applications.

To download the Java SDK and read more about our SDK, please visit developer.itslearning.com.

• Problems with editing assignments for some users
• Adding elements to the working portfolio is again working
• Long response time when running plagiarism control