February 15, 2010 - Sunnyvale, CA - The Etudes team is pleased to announce the release and deployment of a set of new "Site Info" enhancements.
The sample screen shot displays the refinements:
The improvements and the goals behind the new functionality are as follows:
1. Ensure that the integrity of the Etudes rosters is preserved and in sync with your Registrar's data on a daily basis (based on your college's frequency of roster transfers). Protect instructors from making mistakes, like removing or inactivating themselves or students from class or making themselves students.
2. Enable instructors to 'block' students from accessing an Etudes site. Some reasons may be the following:
a) You may need to block a student from accessing your site due to inappropriate behavior. The "block" feature allows you to keep the student out of the class, while you report the case to your administration.
b) It could be that you have multiple sections loaded into one site, but one of the sections doesn't start until a later time. You can block the students from the 2nd section from accessing your class with this feature.
c) It could be that you dropped a student with the Registrar's office, but your Admissions office takes two or more days to process drops, and the student keeps getting changed to 'active' with your college's daily roster data. With this new feature, can now block dropped students from under Site Info while waiting for your Registrar's office to process your requests to drop them. Once the students are officially dropped, the block will be removed and they will be listed as 'dropped' when your Registrar has dropped the student.
(Please remember that Etudes is NOT a registration system. We "read" registration data transferred to Etudes by your IT folks. It is your responsibility to drop students officially with your Admissions' Office).
To Block a student from class, check their name under Site Info and click on Update at the bottom. To unblock them, repeat the process, but uncheck the box. Blocking simply removes your course Tab from their navigation bar.
3. Align the terminology used in the Site Info / Roster interface of Etudes with the language used on campuses (i.e. enrolled / dropped versus active/ inactive). The terms "enrolled" or "dropped" are now used strictly for students who are officially registered with A&R and were _PROVIDED_ to Etudes via your college's roster importation. This makes it clear as to what users were added as guests versus provided to us by your Registrar.
4. Allow instructors to sort by "Status" (make status column sortable) so that they can group 'dropped' students together and see quickly who is no longer in the course.
5. Show 'dropped' status in red to make it easier for faculty to spot withdrawals.
About Etudes:
Etudes is a non-profit 501(c)(3), public charity organization providing hosted Application Services Provider (ASP) using Sakai targeted at small-to-medium schools. Etudes provides a low-cost end-to-end e-learning technology solution including software development and maintenance, hosting, and faculty training. Etudes training ranges from teaching faculty to use of the Etudes software to best practices for online teaching. Etudes can be used to support an entire campus as the campus enterprise learning platform or it can be used to compliment an existing campus learning plaform.
If you would like more information about Etudes, please send a message to inquiry@etudes.org.
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