Monday 22 June 2015

Release Notes - June 22, 2015

Improvements



Sorted student lists on the Class Info tab
The student lists in the Class Info tab are now sorted alphabetically by students’ last names.


Speed improvements for large classes and slower computers
We upgraded how Teacher Dashboard’s interface stores data, decreasing the time it takes to open classes. These improvements are most apparent when opening very large classes (100+ students) on relatively slow devices, such as Chromebooks. The time it takes to open smaller classes on faster devices like MacBooks has also improved, but these improvements are less pronounced.


Bug Fixes



Switching subject folders when filtering students by colour group
If a teacher filtered students by colour group in one subject folder and then navigated to another subject folder, the student panels disappeared. Now, student panels stay visible when a teacher switches to another subject folder.

Thursday 18 June 2015

A Note From Our Founder

Our goal at Hapara is to equip educators with tools to open up the digital world to the classroom. We strive to make the 21st century teacher’s role as empowering and user-friendly as possible. We’re genuinely passionate about helping educators.
Recently we released Teacher Dashboard 2 - an upgrade featuring an improved interface and set of enhancements we developed in consultation with teachers.  Regrettably, a number of customers encountered performance problems with this upgrade. We sincerely apologize for the inconvenience that this has caused; it has been a top priority for our team.
To address these issues, we have undertaken a thorough review of the system, focused on:
  • improving the application responsiveness,
  • increasing our visibility to performance issues, and
  • streamlining our interactions with the new Google APIs.  

This is a significant and continuing program of work, resulting in improved performance and greater stability nearly every week.  For more information regarding these fixes, please refer to our Release Notes.   
Moving forward, we are are actively monitoring performance and refining our systems to improve speed and reliability. Your ongoing feedback is invaluable as we improve our systems; thank you in advance for your continued partnership.  We encourage you to subscribe to this blog and watch our Release Notes for the latest information. We are working hard to ease your user experience and to rebuild your confidence. The entire Hapara team thanks you for your continued support.
Respectfully,

Jan Zawadzki
CEO

Wednesday 17 June 2015

RESOLVED: Teacher Dashboard Service Disruption

This evening from 10:50pm to 11:30pm (PST), we experienced a service disruption with teacherdashboard.com. We are in contact with Google to confirm the root cause of the disruption, in the interest of future prevention.

We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your patience and continued support. 

Temporary Service Degradation

Google is currently investigating an issue with task queues beginning Tuesday, 2015-06-16 20:00 (US/Pacific). Teacher Dashboard users may experience delays with Data Loads, Smart Share and other processes. We apologise for the inconvenience and will provide an update as soon as possible.


Tuesday 16 June 2015

Release Notes - June 16, 2015

Improvements



Improved caching of enrolment data
TD2 cached class enrolment data too aggressively, so it sometimes took a while for students to appear in a class after being added to the class. We clear caches much more quickly now, so enrolment changes take effect more quickly.

Bug Fixes


Showing new files in Smart Share’s file picker
Smart Share’s file picker did not show recently-created files in Google Drive until a user logged out of and back into TD2. Now, the file picker shows newly created as expected.


Opening anonymised Google Site URLs
For schools that chose to anonymise students’ Google Site URLs, TD2 could not open students’ sites. Instead, clicking the button open a site led to an invalid site. This has been resolved.


All Classes tab showing all classes in a district
If a school enables School Separation, then the All Classes tab should show a teacher all of the classes at the teacher’s school. Instead, the tab showed all classes across the district. This has been resolved.


Wednesday 3 June 2015

Release Notes - June 2, 2015

Speed and Performance



Speeding up requests for students’ documents
For students with many folders, getting the students’ documents for the Dashboard tab took up to 4 seconds because we made many requests to Google’s system. We now get all of the data we need in two requests, speeding up the process considerably.


Reducing the number of requests for student data
TD2’s redundant queries to our system for student data are now combined. In addition, we have also started caching answers to those queries to reduce how many queries we make even more.


Reducing the frequency of requests for student data
TD2’s interface refreshed certain data more often than necessary, so we’ve reduced the frequency of such requests.


Speeding up particularly large classes
We’ve refined TD2’s interface to make small speed improvements for particularly large classes, like those with approximately 100 students.


Handling errors on the Dashboard tab
If TD2 could not load a student’s files on the Dashboard tab, a spinner in the student’s panel kept spinning forever. Now, the panel quickly shows, “Failed to retrieve student docs.”


Better progress tracking for Smart Share

For large batches of copies, Smart Share’s progress bar did not always update when files were copied successfully. This gave the impression that copies did not succeed, so we’ve resolved this issue.