Release 16.0

Courses are now the fundamental building block to improving teacher workflow and continuous reporting. They have become standard practice at many schools and are included in our best practice recommendations. With this in mind, we renewed our focus on improving the usability and discoverability of the courses within Schoolbox.  

New Course Creator

Getting started with courses has always been a major obstacle that has resulted in inconsistent uptake of courses.  We wanted to make the whole process from beginning to end as easy and enjoyable as possible. The new course builder will take you step by step from selecting your faculty, to defining your units and creating your assessments. All this happens on a single page so you can now build a course faster than ever.

New Course Import

Once a course is built, the next stage is assigning the course to a class. The course import now provides a dialog for searching existing courses; simplifying discovery and browsing of existing courses. If the course does not exist, you can launch the new creator and get started.

Following feedback on our forum, courses may now be imported to multiple classes simultaneously; allowing you to quickly populate an entire cohort with a course. To ensure assessments are assigned to the correct teachers you may now nominate an owner during import.  Additionally, you can also set due dates for all assessments while importing, saving you time and ensuring consistency across classes.

When viewing assessments, progress and marks, traditionally we have grouped by semester. Now it is possible to define your own time periods. This will allow you to group by year, semester, term or any other period. The only limitation is that the groupings may not overlap. The system will automatically set up your initial periods, but you must maintain this going forward.

To learn more about this, check out our Customising Term Dates doc.

User groups are one of our most powerful features, they enable effective communication across the diverse school community. Originally developed for co-curricular, groups are now used for parent communication, interest groups, capital raising, associations, alumni and more. As the use of groups has grown, the need for an effective management system has become necessary.  

The user provisioning system delivered as part of v15.6 has now been extended to also include the ability to assign users directly to groups based on SIS data. This allows you to dynamically put parents in year level groups, teachers in faculty groups or students in house pages. Any data that is available via the SIS can be used to add or remove users from a group. This User Group Provisioning feature has now been included as part of our Elite plan as well.

To learn more about this, check out our User Provisioning System docs.

Maintaining students’ well being is an important factor for any school. This critical function and hugely requested feature has now been included as part of our Elite plan.

The Pastoral System has been designed to log and track events that affect a student’s life at school. Each event can be tagged and catalogued to assist reporting. We have also included threaded discussions for follow ups and inbuilt notifications to keep everyone in the loop. With pastoral information, data visibility is critical, several layers of control ensure the information is kept private when required. For those utilising Synergetic, you will be able to import and synchronise events between systems to ensure pastoral information remains in your student management system.

To learn more about this, check out our Pastoral Care docs.

The CMS system has long been limited by the need to set permissions per page. This often requested feature at meetups and on our forums will simplify permission management.

Pages will now be created with inheritance by default; removing the need for most users to even set permissions. Inheritance will automatically include role permissions, individual group permissions and even SIS class code permissions. Ensuring that if you have access to the parent folder, you will have the same access to the inheriting folder.  

This change will also open up new permission setup regarding the setup of class pages, including restricting students to only their own classes. Additionally teachers can now be given read access to all classes but still maintain complete access to the classes they are teaching.

With a growing user base and an increasingly sensitive set of data, we turned our focus to improving several facets of our security systems. We have increased password encryption to leading edge levels to ensure passwords stored in Schoolbox can never be decrypted. For parents, the forgotten password function now requires a password reset. As additional protection, passwords stored in the admin area for access to 3rd party systems are now concealed to ensure they cannot be easily obtained.

The overwhelming feedback from our release of the new responsive look was that the notification panel on extra large screens was not to everyone’s taste. We have now made the notifications panel undockable. Simply click the notifications heading and it will alter its behaviour to be visible on hover only, giving you back screen real estate and minimising distraction from notifications.

To simplify page layouts, many of our schools have requested the option to hide titles on components. This feature, originally designed for Tiles, has been very popular. We have now extended the ability to hide titles to Textboxes and Breadcrumbs. Note that titles will not be hidden in write mode, they will only be hidden in read mode.

One missing feature from the attendance front end for Synergetic is that it lacked the ability to pre-populate the attendance with existing absence data. Now if a student has been reported away by the parent, the interface will automatically mark the student as absent and populate the reason and type codes. In addition, we have added summary counts when marking the roll, this was a popular feature in Synergetic that many teachers missed when coming over to our interface.

As always, we continue to invest heavily under the hood to ensure we maintain our platform well into the future. We expect to be upgrading to PHP7 in the next release so preparations have begun to make that possible. We are excited about this upgrade as it should deliver a 30% performance improvement.

This release we have migrated all MySQL connections to PDO, this will reduce the overall MySQL connection counts. Several performance improvements were made to permissions to ensure the new inheritance feature would not create unnecessary load.

Finally, a new CI build system will be used in production to test and package our releases automatically. This will increase our code testing and further speed up deployment.

• Added ability for teachers to submit work on behalf of students
• Users are now soft deleted, rather than hard, leaving all content and material in place so they can be recovered and referenced in the future
• Added new “All” category to dashboard news, can be set to default tab in component configuration
• Completing course tasks no longer reloads the whole page for students
• Added video still processing message when viewing video that has not completed rencoding via the video preview popup
• Added video and audio preview to student returns, submissions and eportfolio showcase
• Added staff directory support for TASS
• Added control of video and audio encoding rates. Warning improved quality will take up more disk and require more bandwidth
• Improved display of plagiarism report
• Garbage Collection System (for cleaning up disk space)
• Synergetic Community Portal Password Updates 
• Improved form/survey attempt view, now you easily can see what answers they gave
• Disable SIS photos, allowing you to upload your own portraits
• Improved student view of submissions and annotations by teachers
• Automatic clean up of orphaned folders, moving them to "Lost and Found"
• Added image gallery for blog posts
• Ability to mark attendance for entire week or other staff. Find configuration information here.
• Added summary for school news, allowing HTML summaries and avoid link to article if no article available
• Many UPS improvements, especially around email handling