We've added a few new features to courses over the past few weeks that we thought we'd highlight for you...

Replies to replies

You can now reply to replies in discussions. So, a student comments, another replies to her, and yet another student replies to that reply. In graded discussions, the next level of replies is included in any reply-based grading criteria.

Incomplete students

We rejiggered how you grade incomplete students and mark them complete. In former times, you'd enter grades and switch the student back to enrolled all in one fell swoop. But that way of combining those actions didn't really suit our users, and change was in order.

Now you can grade assignments for a finalized incomplete student on the Student Course Summary page—and you can grade them as they're handed in, not all in one moment. Meanwhile, marking her complete (which changes her to enrolled and finalizes her grades and attendance) is a separate action. You also have options to fiddle with her pass/fail status during the incomplete phase. The new options will make handling incomplete students a lot simpler for a lot more of our users.

Miscellany: gradebook, Tin Cans, new audio player

We added a new action to the gradebook that lets you fill all empty assignment grades with 0's. It'll come in handy for situations where you have a bunch of ungraded assignments that you don't want to excuse—with one click, you can enter 0 grades for each and every one.

You can now include Tin Can elements in lessons. Tin Can is a software specification that lets learning content and systems speak to each other. If your school is using e-learning content creators like Articulate and Adobe Captivate to generate online learning content, you can export that content as a Tin Can package and incorporate it into a Populi lesson. If you require students to complete the Tin Can, Populi will wait to hear from the element as to whether the student finished before letting him proceed to the next lesson.

Finally, we upgraded the audio player so every user gets the same playback experience regardless of browser.