September 2018

Development Update

Happy start of the 2018/2019 academic year!

Summer flew by this year, and here at Evia Learning we have been busy on more website upgrades! We want to let you know what to expect as you begin classes.

Here is a list of what we have been working on:

 

Progress Report Updates:

The big news is the complete overhaul of Progress Reports for instructors. Since EviaLearning.com launched, we have wanted to re-imagine the Progress Reports interface, and the changes made this summer offer more useful information to you in a more organized way. No longer are you faced with a single list of all attempts a student made at every activity. Instead, there is a 3-tab approach to looking at student scores, depending on how much detail you want to see.

Overview Tab
In the Overview, you will see all of your students in a course group listed and how many activities they have completed out of the number possible in the theme. You will also see an overall percentage score for their completed activities for that theme, as well as the date and time of the last completed activity. Instructors who want to assign a quick overall completion grade to online work will not need to look past the Overview tab.

Student View Tab
In the Student View, you can select any of the students in your class group and view all of their activities in the chosen theme. You can see their score, the date of the last attempt at the activity, and how many attempts they made at the activity. If an activity has a clipboard icon, you can click on that to see more details about their answers for that activity. There is also a new button on this tab that allows you to only show activities that are written responses, in case you want to isolate those activities for review.

Activity View Tab
In the Activity View, you will see a list of all the scored activities in the theme. You can select any activity from that list and see how each student did on that activity. This tab is meant to make it easier to quickly see how all students did on any given activity in a theme or if a large portion of the class had trouble with a particular topic.

Other Progress Report changes
We have also made a couple of overall updates to the Progress Report. First, we now are only showing the highest score achieved instead of showing all the attempts a student made. This should help avoid confusion when students redo an activity for a better score. (Previously a poor score was still shown, which made their overall performance look worse if only skimming the report.) We did add an attempt count to each activity now so that instructors can still easily see how many times a student tried an activity.

We also have put the text to all written response activities directly into the activity information row. This means you no longer have to click multiple buttons to read your students’ written responses!

Take a look at the video below to get an overview of how the new Progress Reports looks and functions.

We are very happy with these changes to the Progress Reports interface, and we hope you feel the same way. Feel free to email us at support@evialearning.com with your thoughts!

Weiter geht’s! is now online!

For those of you who teach German, we are excited to announce that Weiter geht’s! for intermediate German has finally made the move to the web! There are very few changes to the Weiter geht’s! content itself, so if you have used the previous software version, you will be familiar with how this site works as well. The move to our website means that Weiter geht’s! has a Progress Report for instructors apart from the ability to have students make PDF transcripts, and also that the interactive program is no longer a local computer download. Students can access their account from any internet-connected device, including tablets and Chrome books. This is our final software program to move online, and we could not be happier to have accomplished this move!

Auf geht’s! Updates:

The new Auf geht’s! 4th edition textbook is now in the hands of many users, and we continue to support the 3rd edition textbook as well. The online interactive website is the same for both versions, but we have still done a little work to the interactive as well. We have updated the vocabulary lists for all units, and this is reflected both in the interactive practice as well as in the vocabulary PDFs for both instructors and students (and vocab lists in the 4th edition book). We have also added a few new video activities as we begin to expand the AG content to take advantage of the online nature of the site. See below for more details. We hope this will give students a new, fun, and engaging way to practice their language skills.

Pushing into video content:

For those of you using Auf geht’s!, we made time this summer to roll out a new activity type. This one focuses on video and gives students a way to interact with questions directly on the video itself. With our interactive online now, we have the ability to take advantage of the incredible amount of video content on YouTube and other sites. We have implemented new video activities in a few areas to start and plan to continue our foray into video content, both with 3rd party videos as well as our own video-based interviews. As we find the best ways to do this, we will also expand use of video content into Ritmos and Weiter geht’s!.

Dashboard Performance:

In early August, we implemented a behind-the-scenes performance enhancement to the Dashboard as part of our continued effort to create the best user experience possible. This update substantially decreased the amount of time it takes to load the Dashboard page, the most visited page on our website. We continue to work on optimizing performance on other heavily-visited pages.

Well, that’s the gist of our site changes for the start of the fall term! As always, we have more improvements lined up for the future and will be keeping you informed about them when they get closer to release.

I hope everyone has a wonderful fall term!