Course Hub support staff who can view statistics now can see admin-toolbars with links to the statistics pages.
The Course Hub now has a nightly job that validates that enrollments have been passed off to downstream systems (Canvas, WordPress, O365, Panopto, etc). Incremental enrollment changes are still passed off within 15 minutes, but this nightly job will cover any rare cases where networking or system errors cause an incremental change to fail.
Ongoing Work
Creating a new “Offices” site for institution-wide anchor functions.
Creating new Drupal 8 sites for our schools and programs.
Post-launch improvements of the updated Course Hub.
Canvas-course start/end times now expand to cover section dates
When instructors create Canvas courses via the Hub, the Canvas course inherits the term dates by default. There are some cases where course sections have dates that don’t align with the normal dates of the term. To cover these cases the Hub now will now set an earlier start date or later end date when creating the Canvas course so that the Canvas section isn’t made inaccessible by following the term start/end dates. Sections that start or end within the term dates will still just inherit the term start/end dates. These dates will only be set when creating the Canvas course and can be overridden by instructors as desired.
MiddFiles resources can now link to folders from cross-listed sections
Most sections taught each semester have a single section with students enrolled and any cross-listed sections are for categorization purposes only and have enrollments disallowed. There are about a dozen sections each year however that have students enrolled in multiple sections. Often these are cases where one section is the normal one and the other meets a writing requirement.
There is now an option at the bottom of MiddFiles resources to choose which folder to link to. For most resources this will have a single option (the current folder), which is the default if nothing is specified. For cross-listed sections where multiple cross-lists have enrollments, there will be multiple options to choose from. Note that the system that auto-generates MiddFiles folders merges permissions into the first section (alphabetically) already. This choice in the MiddFiles resource just allows linking to this merged folder from the additional sections, it doesn’t actually assign any permissions.
Screen-shot of the MiddFiles resource interface showing the new option.
We launched a new site for the Bread Loaf School of English this week. This is the first of our new sites to use the newsroom functionality that is available for all new office sites.
Fixed an issue with an incorrect destination URL being set in the Service Catalog’s login link.
Embedded Drupal forms in our new Drupal 8 sites will have their iframe height automatically set to match the height of the form.
News thumbnail images will now display at the correct size on mobile devices.
Image captions in Drupal 8 slideshows can now contain basic HTML markup, such as links, emphasis, and italics.
Fixed an issue in WordPress where some configurations of the Jetpack module would cause incorrect “CAS Registration expired” warnings to be printed at the bottom of pages.
Course Hub: Fixed an issue where MiddFiles resources couldn’t be re-saved with new titles/descriptions.
Course Hub: Fixed a regression with GoogleApps authentication when creating new Google Apps resources.
Fixed HTTPS access to https://rikertnordic.com
Ongoing Work
Creating a new “Offices” site for institution-wide anchor functions.
Creating new Drupal 8 sites for our schools and programs.
Post-launch improvements of the updated Course Hub.
We have added news and blogging functionality to the Offices and Services site. When the ITS site relaunched on that platform shortly we’ll be moving our news over there.
The Grants site has moved to the new Offices and Services platform.
The Middlebury Institute site now has the same charting capabilities as our other Drupal 8 sites, adding access to multi-faceted bar charts. Additionally, we have fixed an issue that was preventing the donut chart type from rendering.
Ongoing Work
Creating a new “Offices” site for institution-wide anchor functions.
Creating new Drupal 8 sites for our schools and programs.
We are pleased to announce the Course Hub update was completed last week. When you next visit courses.middlebury.edu you will see the new interface. For the Institute when you visit courses.miis.edu you will be directed to the new hub at courses.middlebury.edu, please update your bookmarks accordingly. This image shows the new Course Hub interface.
If you have questions or comments about the Course Hub, or you would like to report an issue, please submit a Helpdesk ticket.
The Course Hub’s new look and feel is both mobile-friendly and more accessible. The general user experience and options are largely similar to what users have come to expect in the old Course Hub with small tweaks here and there.
The underlying data-processing engine that runs the Course Hub has been rebuilt from the ground up to streamline how it how it handles user data. The old Hub required several stages of bulk-processing of all class-groups to occur so that it could determine enrollment changes and pass these off to resources like Canvas. Having several stages where every enrollment had to be processed would take between 2-15 hours for new enrollments to cascade through the system. In contrast, the new Course Hub looks at enrollment changes incrementally as they come in and can push new student-enrollments downstream to Canvas and other Resources minutes after they are recorded in Banner.
The old method of scheduling news stories to appear in Drupal 8 conflicted with the draft / published / archived content moderation workflow. We have improved this with a new scheduling system that will publish drafts at a prescribed time.
An issue that prevented saving Google Calendar content and sometimes prevented the calendar from appearing on our Drupal 7 sites was fixed.
The update of the admin_views Drupal module mentioned above allowed us to restore a custom report to the Non-College Housing site’s administration interface.
Ongoing Work
Creating a new “Offices” site for institution-wide anchor functions.
Creating new Drupal 8 sites for our schools and programs.
This update also includes an admin email verification feature. Every six months, when you log into a WordPress site where you have Administrator privileges, you’ll be asked to verify the central contact email for your site. This is a helpful and important feature that will help us understand which sites are being actively maintained and who to contact should we need to change one of the features that site uses. More information about admin email verification is available here.
The Big Number chart component in Drupal 8 now supports decimal places and the percent bar chart type will show the numeric percents next to the category labels.
The 25th Reunion site for the class of 1990 was using a third-party theme which is no longer supported due to an undisclosed security issue. We have remove the site.
A feature of the administration interface for the Non-College Housing site is no longer supported due to an undisclosed security issue. We have remove the code that provided this feature and notified the site admin of a workaround.
There is a new “blogger” role on the Library website for people who just need access to post news and blog items.
Ongoing Work
Creating a new “Offices” site for institution-wide anchor functions.
Creating new Drupal 8 sites for our schools and programs.
