August 1st, 2014 – Release Notes

August 1st, 2014 – Release Notes

The SIMnet summer release party continues! In addition to debuting tons of new content, we’re making sure we get all of our improvements to the user experience up before you start planning your courses and your students start taking them. Without further ado:

Updates to the Course Manager

• In the My Account section you can now export or print idle, active, and inactive students grids.

• In the Classes section, you can now elect to auto-archive students when you archive a class.

• We’ve made Mac Supported Projects easier to assign.

• All Mac certified projects have had (Mac Supported) added to the end of the project name. Now you can easily determine which projects fully support Mac Office 2011.

• Projects that are Mac supported also have an entry in the Actions Menu for you to download the custom mac instruction pdf.

• Changes have made adding your own Resources easier and more dynamic.

  • In the past, when, making a change to an existing resource file was a pain. You’d need to delete it and re-add the file. Now you can simply edit the file. Navigate to the resource and click the “Edit” button in the upper right corner of the screen. Upload your new file. All of the class assignments remain in tact!

• You can set the number of attempts you’d like your students to have on each resource.

• Resources now support supplements. Supplemental resources are links or files that are in addition to the primary resources. If you’re currently compressing multiple files into a .zip package you can now split them up and have the students download each individual file.

• The SIMnet gradebook and MH Campus gradebook now sync better.

  • Newly created columns will now send the assignment start date and due date to the Learning Management System.

  • Grades will now only be sent to the LMS after the student starts the assignment. For example, when an exam is started the grades will begin to flow to the LMS for that student and exam. This will prevent the LMS from notifying the student of a failing grade before they start the assignment.

• The Gradebook is now more flexible and user friendly.

  • All grades will show up as a dash “-” for assignments that haven’t been started by the student.

  • If you are designing a course that you’d like to be weighted by total points, or if you’d like every assignment to contribute to a final grade equally, you can now reset the total points for an assignment. Edit the column in the gradebook and click the “Max Points” check box and enter a new total points value. The grades and calculated columns based on the grade will update automatically when you refresh data.

• The new Rolling Grade option allows instructors to quickly visualize how well a student is doing based on what they’ve turned in so far. Calculated columns now have a “Use Rolling Grade” preference. That gives instructors the ability to intervene earlier in the semester if a student is falling behind. A blue line at the bottom of each calculated column also displays what percentage of assignments for each calculation have values.

Updates to the Student Portal

• When a class is closed students are no longer allowed to disenroll from the class.

• We’ve added newdownload & submit file wizardsto smooth the Project submission process.

• We’ve made the Exam Environment more secure and transparent.

  • The student name is now on-screen during an exam. This helps the instructor ensure that the student who is taking the exam matches the student account receiving the grade.

• Students will now get a warning when the exam is nearly over. When 10% of the total time is remaining the student will see a message, “Attention: exam ending soon.” and their timer will turn red.