Starting on 2 May 2013, the second update so far this year contains some long-anticipated features. Based on feedback from users and submissions in our idea portal, we're happy to introduce a brand new file uploading system and the possibility for copying courses with all its content and making course templates. The update also includes criteria-based assessment – also known as rubrics – in addition to many other changes and new features.

Starting on 26 February 2013, itslearning will be updated with a number of new and enhanced features. All sites will be upgraded within a week – so don’t worry if you can’t see the changes right away. In the first update this year, we are happy to offer the possibility of integrating third-party software in itslearning as well as a new data analyst tool that takes associative analytics to a whole new level.

An increasing number of teachers are turning to the itslearning platform when planning for their courses, 2012 company figures show. An uptake in the use of the itslearning lesson planner this year compared to last year shows that itslearning users are using the platform to support teaching processes, says Bart van Kimmenade, product manager for pedagogy and personal learning at itslearning. “Our customers are more interested in the planner than they were before.

Have you ever wondered who actually makes itslearning? Meet Larisa Romanova and Mikael Karlsson – two of the 40 employees comprising itslearning’s engineering department – and get a glimpse of how they work. A native of Russia, Larisa holds a Master’s Degree in Economics and Mathematics from Perm State University, in Russia, and works as a test engineer.

Anthony Salcito grew up in a tough neighbourhood in New York City. A self-proclaimed geek, one day he discovered that technology had saved him from gangs, crime and drugs. Technology became a gateway to something better.

itslearning held its first partner bootcamp in the last week of February. Three new partners from Mexico, Turkey and Ecuador travelled to Norway for the week-long training course, and learnt all they need to know about how to set up, market, sell and support itslearning in their market. “I arrived in Norway with high expectations of itslearning,” says Tan Caglayan of Çağlayan Kitabevi, Istanbul.

The Best use of itslearning awards 2011 received nearly 50 entries from across Europe. We’re pleased to announce the two winners, who will both receive an iMac and Canon LEGRIA HF G10 video camera for their school. There were some fantastic ideas, including innovative ways to use video to teach vocational subjects and a great way to motivate language learners.

itslearning was updated on 9 February 2012. This time we have focused on improvements that will make life easier for teachers. We have improved the calendar and assessment record, enhanced some of the content blocks, released a new version of the editor and much more.

If you are one of the 2000 visitors at Online Educa in Berlin you are more than welcome to visit us at our stand B63 for a nice chat and demonstration of new possibilities in itslearning!  Check out: itslearning presentations Schoolforum Take our quiz - win an iPad Visit itslearning at Online Educa at stand B63 in the sponsors hall.

itslearning was updated on 17 November 2011. This time we've updated the look and feel, but we've got other news as well. In addition to the design refresh, learners and their supervisors can now access important information through the new person profile.

If you are one of the 299,000 visitors at The Frankfurt Book Fair you are more than welcome to visit us at our stand D1442 ( Hall 4.2 Education) for a nice chat and demonstration of new possibilities in itslearning! Read more about the conference and see our exciting presentations here

itslearning was updated on 21 June 2011. This time we have improved the handling of multimedia files, and we're happy to introduce a brand new content block for notifying you about new and updated elements in your courses. In addition we have many more changes we hope you'll find interesting – from planner updates to export of data.

Imagine you're a teacher at a school with 700 students, your class numbers 100 students – and you only have two computers without internet connection. This is the situation Moliehi Sekese and her colleagues face daily. But they make the most of the resources they have, because they know that education is the key to a better future.

BERGEN: Today, itslearning announced that it will acquire a 51% stake in educational technology provider Dactique. This cooperation will make itslearning the largest learning platform provider in the Netherlands, enabling the company to offer even better service and products to the Dutch educational sector. Norwegian-based educational ICT provider itslearning announced today that it will shortly acquire majority ownership of the Dutch company Dactique.

Are you interested in new tools to enhance your teaching? Award-winning author and teacher Russell Stannard presents three exciting online tools that can bring new life to your teaching. In a recent webinar, Russell talked about Todaysmeet, Vocaroo and Jing which are all free.

According to a recent survey by itslearning, 75% of teachers rated parental engagement as either ‘important’ or ‘very important’ for the success of a child’s education, but nearly half don't have the time or means to involve parents regularly. Could the answer be the parent portal?

A new version of itslearning has been released. In this version we've made it easier to change skins for individual users or groups, improved the attendance, assessment and behaviour systems and made enhancement to the planner and more. Time-saving improvements to the attendance, assessment and behaviour system Do you use systems other than itslearning to manage attendance, assessment and behaviour?

Timetable for alternating weeks (A-B weeks) Course teachers can now easily switch between week set-ups if they use alternating timetables in their courses. When the teacher defines the timetable for a course, they get the option to define one or more week templates. This will save the teacher time because they don't have to manually change the lesson set-up for each week.

Planner Getting started with the planner made easy In order to help teachers get started with the planner, we have now added a hideable tip box on the planner page with a link to the help system. Planner saves automatically as you work When working with the planner, all changes are now saved automatically as you work. For the user, this means that the browser will keep the position the user was working in, and not jump back to the top of the page when the user adds a new lesson or topic.

Better support for itslearning when using mobile devices Users logging on with a mobile device – such as an iPhone or Android phone – can now use the simple editor to when working in itslearning. (The rich-text editor does not support mobile devices.) This gives mobile users almost all the same functionality as computer users. Assign different interfaces and skins to different users and groups Administrators can now select which skin will be used by different users at their site, so they can dif...

A new version of itslearning has been released. In this version we've made it easier to change skins for individual users or groups, improved the attendance, assessment, behaviour systems and the planner and much more. Choose different skins for individual users or groups To make sure the itslearning experience is tailored to the individual user, administrators can now decide what skin different people use.

In what ways can you benefit from integrating your content with the itslearning platform? According to itslearning’s Director of Global Sales and Services John Arthur Berg, it’s easy to get started – and a partnership can be lucrative, even for vendors with small applications. "itslearning has more than 2 million users, and the potential in our user mass, combined with our tools for handling Digital Rights Management (DRM) and licensing, can make it profitable to partner with us," says John Arth...

An award-winning approach to teaching science through itslearning Oddvar Sunde teaches physics, mathematics and chemistry at Lister Upper Secondary School in Vest-Agder, Norway. He has used itslearning for approximately ten years – and during this time he has acquired valuable knowledge about how to use it efficiently. He has even won an award for his work, but what did he do to earn it?

itslearning has been updated with a new version. The last update this year focuses on improving existing features – including the behaviour and attendance systems. We are also delighted to introduce brand new features, such as a new tool for administrators called "Workflow" that lets administrators decide when different users or roles see the attendance, behaviour and assessment information.

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.

New information channel We can now give users better information about updates, new features, critical bugs, scheduled downtime and more through an information box on the dashboard and log in pages. The information box appears at the top of the screen, and you can remove the message after you've read it. And as some information is only relevant to certain people, we can select which profiles can see the information box (such as administrators only, or administrators and teachers).

We are proud to introduce a system that enhances the workflow, as well as a new role for headteachers. Workflow It is now possible for administrators to decide when different people (roles) see the attendance, behaviour and assessment information in different phases. This new feature is called "Workflow" and makes the workflow of a site smoother.

This entry describes miscellaneous minor updates and corrections. The updates may be small, but you'll find some interesting news, such as a tree menu fix and new look and feel for content blocks. And perhaps most important: The message system no longer sends out messages when assignments are edited.

3 December 2010: Today, it’s learning announced that it will acquire educational technology provider InfoStance from the French publishing giant Hachette Livre. The deal should enable it’s learning to use InfoStance’s expertise in school administration systems to create an even stronger learning platform. What new features do our customer have in store?

it’s learning is supporting the ELvis Comenius project, an EU-funded project that aims to prepare students for a new technological age without traditional country borders. As part of the project, a group of students from the Netherlands recently visited a school in Italy – and got themselves on Salento WebTV.

If you are one of the 2000 visitors at Online Educa in Berlin you are more than welcome to visit us at our stand B60 for a nice chat and demonstration of new possibilities in itslearning! We also hope that you won’t miss out on our customers exciting presentations:

it's learning was present at the Del & Bruk Conference at Sandvika Upper Secondary School in Norway on 17 November to hand out prizes to teachers who had distinguished themselves with creative use of it’s learning. All nominees are teachers who stand out as examples for colleagues and learners – and as true everyday heroes, we think they deserve extra appreciation for their work.

12 April 2010, Bergen, Norway – Microsoft and it’s learning, an international learning platform provider, today signed a Memorandum of Understanding to improve products and services that will transform teaching methods and advance next-generation learning. The agreement represents the first Education Partner Alliance where the Microsoft cloud computing services are adopted to develop a fully cloud based, integrated offering to the education sector.

4 May, 2010, Burlington, MA, USA – After a comprehensive judging process, The ComputED Gazette chose it’s learning as an award recipient for the 16th Annual Best Educational Software Awards (BESSIE Awards). it’s learning won in the Learning Platform category.

itslearning has been updated with a new version. This time we hope to reduce some of the burden connected to the start of a new school year for teachers and administrators – with focus on reusing. We are also proud to release a brand new attendance system for all customers, a new progress report and a number of new features and improvements to the dashboards.

The beginning of a new school year can be stressful for administrators and teachers. We are now releasing some features meant to reduce the work burden connected to the start of a new school year. Copying course elements It is now possible to copy elements between courses without copying participants, answers and submissions.

The new attendance keeping system has been enhanced with more features and improvements. As a result, the old attendance system is removed and replaced with a brand new solution. The new attendance system has been in beta for a while, and was described in this entry.

Dashboards Aggregated content blocks A number of aggregated content blocks, allowing users to add content blocks to their personal dashboards, hierarchies, courses and parent dashboards are now available from the add content block pop-up. Because of the increasing number of content blocks have changed the way the content blocks are organised. There are now two tabs in the add content block window: 'Create' and 'Aggregated'.

The new progress report shows the participant's progress in the course, measured by the number of mandatory elements. It is also possible to create rules for course completion. Example: Eight out of ten mandatory elements should be completed (see Course completion below).

Assignments Learner: Join existing activity group When entering a group assignment, a learner has the option to join an existing assignment group. Existing members of the group are notified of new members via the internal messaging system. This allows a teacher with, for example, 60 participants in a course to hand out an assignment and tell the learners to organise themselves in groups of, for example, four.

A patch has been released which addresses some issues that were discovered after the previous release. The update contains the following changes: Course administration: The tip box that was introduced after the previous release is removed from the course administration page. The 'Enrol me' function also performs better.

A new version of itslearning has been released. The most important news includes a new parent dashboard, and a new library, which are described in separate blog entries. The other news is described below.

A new version of itslearning has been released. The most important news includes a new parent dashboard, and a new library, in addition to almost 150 enhancements and corrections. Engage the parents!

A new personal library is created for teachers and administrators, in which course elements can be created. The elements can be used in multiple courses, or shared with other users. In courses, elements from My library are added from the Ready-to-use content list of resources.

In order to continue delivering the best of the breed in learning platforms we need to harness the latest web browser technology. As of now, older browsers are slowing both us and you down. Typical examples of such old browsers are Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 and 7.

Before you start using eSafety, policies and terms it is important to make sure that the hierarchies are correctly set up. Recently we introduced a setting called Hierarchy type in Administration >> Hierarchy >> Add/Edit hierarchy. This setting is crucial in order to make eSafety, terms, and policies work.

New year – new possibilities. The first update this year has focus on the administration area and attendance and behaviour keeping. The mentor role is expanded to manage both attendance and behaviour keeping.

eSafety Administrators can now configure the users' visibility and communication settings for a site – in itslearning, these settings are called eSafety. Some rules are configurable, while others cannot be edited. In short, the settings decide: who will find users in searches.

Attendance 2.0 beta Forget everything you know about the old attendance keeping system – we now introduce a brand new attendance platform. Our efforts have been focused on making the attendance keeping as efficient and simple as possible. The new system has keyboard shortcuts, supports tabbing, and features a new and intuitive user interface.

SDK update: support for editor plug-ins If you have an idea for a new learning tool in itslearning, you should consider making it yourself – or hire a developer to do it! Our SDK program has been running for a while, and a skilled developer can add both applications and plug-ins to your itslearning site. New in this release is support for plug-ins, countries, languages and licenses.

itslearning will be updated on 7 January 2010. During the update – from 17:00 to 06:00 CET – there will be limited availability of the dashboards, pages and Diglib. itslearning will be running as normal, but when we update the dashboards will be replaced by the old course landing page and main page.

To prevent pages and dashboards from being overfilled with content blocks, itslearning has been updated with a change that limits the number of content blocks. You are now allowed to have 20 active content blocks. But don’t worry – we have not deleted anything.

We are happy to announce Java as a new programming language in our software developer kit (SDK). The Java version of the SDK wraps the REST API for applications in it's learning. It also contains a sample application to illustrate the usage for Java developers.

Some users have reported problems after the release two days ago. We have fixed the following issues: Problems with editing assignments for some users Adding elements to the working portfolio is again working Long response time when running plagiarism control

We are happy to announce that itslearning was updated on 10 September. The fourth update so far this year introduces new features that we believe will contribute to an even better user experience for teachers and learners. itslearning now with Gmail We are thrilled to announce that itslearning – in partnership with Google – now offers free e-mail accounts for our users.

The idea portal has been up and running for a couple of weeks now. The most popular idea so far is entitled Cleaner interface without frames and better overview. This idea suggested that we removed the frames in the interface.

We have now updated itslearning with a new version. Read more about the new features below.  Individual learning plans An important new feature is the individual learning plan.

The standard itslearning version contains the basic tools you need to start using itslearning. But, perhaps you see the need for tools that are not included in the standard version? Do you want to make a tool that suits your own organisation's needs?

Our product roadmap highlights the new features and improvements we have planned for itslearning in 2009. The most important news for 2009 includes: Customisation Lesson 2.0 Parent and mentor roles Individual learning plans Whiteboard in conference Sharing ..and a preview of the next generation itslearning View the full roadmap below. Note: The details in the roadmap are provisional and may change without notice.

Do you have an idea that you think will improve your itslearning experience? We have just launched a new system for accepting ideas, and we want you to contribute! Feel free to suggest new features or improvements to existing functionality.

New planner Most of this release has been focused around the planner - a new fantastic planning tool for the teacher! The planner is a new and greatly enhanced version of the tool previously known as lesson planner. Our goal has been to provide teachers with a better course planning tool and at the same time give the learners a better overview of plans and activities in courses.

After the last software update there has been some issues with it's learning. A patch was released today to fix the following: The simple and java applet editors are now working in the messaging system. The login issues caused by corrupted cookies are addressed.

The grade book is updated with several user-friendly enhancements and new features. Our main goal has been to improve the workflow for the teacher. Read more about the enhancements below.

itslearning has been updated with a new version. The list below covers the most important new features. Grade book Intermediate skin Web 2.0 plug-in in the editor Unique login URL Plagiarism control Who is online?

As most of you probably know www.itslearning.com saw some serious disruption to its service yesterday. We have logged more than 5 hours of downtime, most of it within core working hours. This makes yesterday one of the worst days we have had in terms of quality of service and this is treated with the outmost seriousness.

New features Conference (beta) We are happy to introduce the beta version of our conference tool. The new tool is flash based, and supports up to four simultaneous video connections. In addition to video and sound functionality the video conference also have a text-based chat.

This release contains several new features and enhancements. In addition we have made more than 100 improvements to the way the application works. You find the entire list of news and bug fixes below.

This software update contains some fixes connected to the grade book, email attachments, SCORM and Rich-text editor. The issues that are addressed in this update are listed below. Server error in grade book If a manual grade book assessment was created, a server error occurred when the grade book column was clicked.

This release includes support for French language, some enhancements of existing functionality and bug fixes. See below for a more detailed explanation of the changes and new features. The screen shots shows the enhanced search results view.

itslearning was updated 25 June 2008 with a new patch. The patch addressed the problem that occurred after the last release with the SCORM reports. The SCORM reports are now working properly.

This release includes the first version of our primary version, some enhancements of existing functionality and over 50 bug fixes. See below for a more detailed explanation of the changes and new features. New features Beta version of the primary version We have now released the first version of the it’s learning primary version.

The development of the primary version is progressing according to plan. Our developers are implementing the functionality one part at a time and the work is progressing steadily. In the early development phase we have prioritised building a course structure with a simple editor and SCORM support.

itslearning was updated with a new patch 17 April 2008. We have identified and fixed two potential performance issues. The patch did not contain any features that are noticeable by a normal user.

We have updated itslearning with a new patch. The following is new in patch 3.3.0.1002 (13 April 2008): DirectEdit As a result of the update to itslearning 3.3 DirectEdit (the tool that allows you to edit files) was not able to set the edited document as the current version. This bug has now been fixed.

We are happy to announce that a new version of itslearning has been released. We have made a web page that describes the new features. It opens in English by default, but you can click the language tabs to select your preferred language: What’s new in 3.3?

We have updated itslearning with a new patch. The following is new in patch 3.2.0.1010 (17 January 2008): Messaging system - Email Some of our users have experienced that the content did not display properly in email messages. A typical example was that the message content was missing. This has now been fixed.