The summer is almost over, and with it ends our major series of updates. We will of course continue to update small bugs as they pop up, but the major weekly releases end today. It’s been a very busy summer and we’re going to let things settle and let students and teachers get to work.
Here’s a list of the fixes we’ve addressed in this update:
- Instructors updating their time zones in “Course Settings” to anything but Eastern time were given a PHP error. That is now resolved.
- Eli had been allowing instructors to create revision tasks with no associated work (either a revision plan or a revise and resubmit task). This has been addressed – instructors can now create revision tasks with one or the other or both, but not none.
- The last update solved a problem where revision tasks couldn’t be deleted, but that raised a new problem where instructors couldn’t create a new revision task for writing task where a revision had already been deleted. That has now been solved.
- When students begin a revision task, the original writing will now be automatically loaded into the WYSIWYG composing space (assuming the revision is for a writing task that was composed in Eli).
- In the comprehensive revision report, instructors will now be able to access all reviews of a writing task, putting all artifacts of the write-review-revise cycle in one, easy-to-access place.
- In the “Student as a Reviewer” report, the average number of comments made by the class was reported as a total, not an average. This has been fixed.
- Likewise, an error caused the “Average Rating of Comments” to be reported inaccurately across the “Responses to Writing” and “Student as a Reviewer” reports. This has been addressed.
- Legacy users who signed up without an email addresses were directed to an old, deprecated version of the “edit settings” page that resulted in PHP errors. Legacy users are now redirected to the new “Account Settings” interface.
- The text of the “Join a Course” box on the student homepage was updated to reduce confusion about course codes vs. subscription codes and does a better job of steering users to the appropriate space.
- A bug caused the helpfulness rating a student assigned to a piece of feedback to be locked to changes without a page refresh. Students should now be able to rate their feedback and change their ratings as needed.
- Fixed a bug that caused name misalignments on the “Add to Revision Plan” interface. Before, a piece of feedback added by a writer was labeled as though it had been given by the writer and not the reviewer.
- Students will no longer be required to give responses to classmates who did not submit a writing task. If they were assigned to review a classmate who did not submit, they will not see that student’s name.
- Users who currently have a subscription but who attempt to redeem a subscription code that doesn’t actually extend their subscription will be given a useful error message and the code will not be redeemed.
- Review groups with large numbers of students will now have links to the students for them to review displayed consistently, rather than a mix of tabs and bubbles.
- Revision plans will now be locked to changes after a student submits the actual revision to a piece of writing. This prevents revision plans from being edited after the revisions to a writing task have been completed (instructors can always create a revision task for the revision if needed). This will also allow students to view their revision plans at a later time, but they will be locked to edits.
- Last, but perhaps most important – the “allow late submissions” option has been removed from writing tasks. Locking writing tasks to student submissions after the due date has been observed to cause serious consequences for students. Missing the first step in our new task sequence (write -> review -> revise) causes serious problems for students who miss the writing task, preventing them from participating in later tasks, with no way for the instructor to allow an override. Now, students will be able to submit a writing task all the way up the due date of the revision. The instructor will be notified when a writing task has been submitted late and how late it is so that they may assess the student accordingly, but the student will still be able to submit and participate in later tasks.
A long list of problems and annoyances addressed in just a week! As always, we’re listening to you, either at our support email address, on Twitter and on Facebook. Happy reviewing!
