The main focus for this release has been on improving existing features, including the behaviour and attendance systems – as well as some minor changes to assessment.

Attendance

We assume learners are present, unless told otherwise

After the release of the new attendance systems, there's been some confusion about marking learners "present". To clear things up: Presence is kept automatically – teachers and mentors don't have to do anything to mark learners as present. An information message reminding you of this now appears in the <Keep attendance interface.

Group absence remarks save time

It is now possible for teachers and mentors to add an absence remark for a group of participants. To do this, check the participants you want to add remarks about, and then set the absence remark at the top of the column.

Register absence directly from the attendance content block

We've added a "Register absence" link to the attendance content block, so learners and their parents can now register absence without having to go through the ePortfolio. Learners can also register their own absence from Status and follow-up >> Attendance in a course. This feature can be used to notify a teacher about planned absence, or provide reasons for unplanned absence.

Headteachers: Search for users on the attendance page

It is now possible for a headteacher to search for users on the keep attendance page. If a user is a headteacher for more than one organisation, the organisation drop down menu is shown instead of the organisation name.

The option to display term attendance

If attendance is disabled in Administration >> Edit global settings, attendance data is no longer displayed in the term details.

Behaviour

Let learners and parents see behaviour assessment in the content block

If a teacher or mentor has made behaviour assessments available for parents and/or learners, the assessments now appear in a new behaviour content block.

Choose what remarks the parents can see

When teachers and mentors add behaviour remarks, they can decide whether the remark should be visible to the learner's parents.

Easier commenting for mentors

To make the interface more efficient, we've changed the mentor's view of the behaviour overview. Mentors can now set behaviour remarks directly in a learner's behaviour overview page without having to click Add remark.

Behaviour overview for parents

On the parent dashboard, parents can now see a content block that shows all the behaviour incidents and achievements that have been flagged as visible to parents.

Selecting assessment categories for behaviour remarks

When adding a remark to a learner, teachers can select whether to connect the remark to one of the behaviour assessments in the term.

Completion of behaviour assessments

Mentors and headteachers can now set behaviour assessments as "complete for a term" from their respective interfaces.

Giving administrators more power to assess behaviour grades

Administrators can now enable and disable behaviour assessment grades, and define the number of behaviour grades to use.

Behaviour scales now available worldwide

Localised behaviour assessment scales are now available in all countries.

Assessment

Terms replace periods in grade book

Periods were introduced to permit teachers to place different course elements in different time periods. These have now been replaced by terms. Terms can be connected to a course, allowing teachers to create time periods based on school or site structures. The terms enable consistent and higher data quality across courses and support export of different periodised data.

There are benefits for the teachers, too. They will no longer have to decide which periods they should use for the grade book, and they can use different final assessments for terms as well as periodisation based on terms.

We are aware that you can't categorise the grade book by topic anymore, but this will be addressed in a future update. Terms are managed by administrators from Administration >> Terms.

Giving teachers the power to control final assessments

Teachers can now set and submit final term assessments in the grade book and submit final assessments of a course term.