New features on the Rockalingua Learning Management System

We have been working hard this course. Until Christmas we were totally focused on making the web app as fast and reliable as possible to adapt to the increasing traffic. We also fixed several hard to track issues some of you were reporting to us. That led us to rewrite a lot of code and this was good, because it made us conscious of the different bottlenecks we need to face in the next main version of the software.

We have big plans for that, but it will take a lot of time to redesign and rewrite the whole thing. So we didn't want to let another course go by without first addressing at least some of the most frequently asked improvements we have been hearing from you.

Here you have a non-exhaustive list of the ones that shipped in this week's update:

• Searchable activities window when creating or editing a task:
  
  
• The content appears in two groups, first the unlocked activities and then the rest of them. Both groups are sorted alphabetically and you can assign activities from both.
• There is a search box, the contents are filtered as you type.
• You can perform a search, select some activities, perform another search and mark some other ones and you only need to press confirm when you are ready. All the selections will be added at once.
• The pop-up on the "Add Task to Multiple Classes" form is the same now, to avoid confusion.
• The Class Analytics page has cool new features:
• You can filter the tasks by due date.
  
  
  
• You can generate a PDF report for the class with average progress of each student.
  
  
  
• Clicking on the student names opens a new personalized student report.
  
  
  
• When you change a student to another class his/her previous work is now accessible:
  
  
  You just go to the Class Analytics page of the current class, click on the student's name and you can see also the progress this student made on other classes tasks.

That's all nice and good but we are not stopping there. Here is a list of planned improvements and features to come in the near future. This one is ordered by priority for us, but let us know if you think there's something that should come first.

• Due date filter on the tasks list for each class.
• A digital version of the worksheets, so no more printing is necessary any more. Students will be able fill them in online and you will review it online too. We'll always generate the pdf anyway for those who prefer to work on paper, though.
• We are designing a new support system that will allow students to request our help when something is wrong. Basically it will allow them to generate a report of the issue automatically, capture the screen showing the problem and send it to the teacher, who can just redirect it to us (with anonymized data) or answer the student directly if suitable. No more taking pictures with your phone or guessing what the student meant when describing a problem.
• Students will be able to do any task after the due date, and that will be shown in the task and class analytics pages.

So what do you think about all this?. Please let us know if you have any sugestion or if you have any problem with the new features.

With love

The Rockalingua Dev Team