2021 has been a big year for Populi!
Because our primary focus day-to-day is improving the functionality of Populi, most of what we’re highlighting here are improvements we’ve made to the tool. But there are a few other tidbits mixed in as well.
Student View
Our first feature of 2021 allowed instructors to see the course as a student would:
- They can see what a student’s general POV on a course is—how assignments look, tests, lessons, etc.
- They can also do basic troubleshooting on student complaints; determine whether or not a student should be able to see or access a given assignment, and so on.
Export Helper Improvements
These improvements make getting reports out of Populi even easier with:
- Some slick new icons to distinguish between types of fields
- The ability to save regularly-used field sets and share them with your work buddies
Duplicate Assignments
Instructors’ lives were made even better by:
- Following the quick and easy process of copying previously-created assignments
- Not spending time doing this manually
People Merger
Copies aren’t always good, though—we added the People Merger to help consolidate any profiles with duplicates into a singular profile.
New Website
Let’s take a quick break from features to talk about the fact that we redesigned our website this year!
The new site possesses a cleaner feel and more personality. You’re on the blog on the new site now, but click over to populi.co to have a look around—we particularly enjoy the Customers page where a bunch of the amazing people from the institutions we work with say nice things about us. It’s not conceited, it’s just… validating.
Login Approvals Update
We updated the way our Login Approvals work.
- 2FA changed from text messaging to using authenticator apps - a better solution for login security.
- This helps us sleep at night knowing that we’re doing everything we can to keep your data safe.
Percent-Based Awards
This year, institutions gained the ability to offer percent-based Financial Aid awards.
Rather than a specific amount, percent-based awards auto-calculate awards based on a students cost of attendance, or their invoiced term amounts.
Financial Auditor Role
- Read-only access to all financial information
- Able to see everything to do with finances but unable to make any changes—look, but don’t touch
Forms Beta
This is a big one and, even though it’s not officially released, we’re excited about it. This feature lets you design custom forms to collect data from students seamlessly within Populi.
The beta of the feature went live this year. We’re working out some bugs here and there before we push it live to everyone, but if you’d like to be part of the beta, reach out to and we’ll get you set up.
We anticipate that Forms will be available to everyone in early 2022.
Infrastructure Improvements
Without getting into the technical details, our development team did some amazing work strengthening Populi’s infrastructure. It’s one of those things that’s incredibly important, but at the same time, it’s not very visible. Trust us, though—they’ve done great work to enable Populi to continue to add more users while maintaining reliability.
Live Events
- We’ve done a couple of live events and thought they were great. Here’s a link to a past one.
- We’re planning to do more.
- Click here to enter your email so you’ll receive updates about upcoming Livestream events!
Christmas & New Year’s Hours
Finally, a bit of housekeeping—our offices will be closed for the holidays starting on Thursday, Dec. 23 and we’ll be back in the office Monday, Jan. 3. You can still send support requests during that time through Populi Support or by emailing .
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from Populi!