Release Updates June 2023

We’ve released a new site-level feature flag setting that allows you more control over the Add to Calendar links that your learners receive via email when they enroll in a webinar event.

Our event learner notifications include several Add to Calendar substitution values and when learners click on Add to Calendar links in their learner notification emails, they can add the event to their personal calendar.

For Outlook and Google Add to Calendar links {{addToMicrosoftOutlookCalendar}} and {{addToGoogleCalendar}}, the calendar event links learners to the URL of the content item within Thought Industries. On event day, learners click on the link in their calendar, are prompted to log into your site, and then are redirected to the webinar provider.

ICS links {{addToCalendarLink}} and {{downloadCalendarIcs}} have a different default behavior - they link directly to the webinar provider's event (e.g., directly to Zoom, WebEx, etc.). On event day, learners click on the link in their calendar and are taken directly to the webinar provider (no need to log in). Attendance is still recorded correctly; the only difference is that the learner isn’t required to log in first.

You can now change the default behavior for ICS links so that it matches the learner experience for Outlook and Google links. On event day, when learners click on the link in their calendar, they will be prompted to log into your site and then redirected to the webinar provider.

• In order to support more complex types of assignments, we’ve made an adjustment to the learner interface to allow learners to attach up to two files to an assignment submission. All attachments are also available in the grading interface and via the assignment submissions REST API.

• Add appropriate labels to elements within the expanded course bookmark menu to make them accessible to users who are making use of screen readers.
• Adjust label and element type for course bookmark button so that its purpose is clear to users who are making use of screen readers.
• Ensure that screen readers can clearly read the different states of course bookmark functionality.

• Unable to recieve attendance data from Zoom if "Automated Captions" setting is active on the meeting.
• The completion criteria of the video content items does not get coppied when copying a video content item.
• Bulk user import jobs run by panorama admin users will show as completed in the UI but will not get removed from the list of running jobs.
• Selecting a page from pagination of user list and then searching for a name returns no results (when results exist).

Help keep learners on track with Assigned Programs! Assigned Programs allows Admins and Panorama roles with certain permissions to add due dates to learning paths. Here are the highlights:

• Assigned Programs requires learners to complete content by a due date, or else be marked incomplete.
• Due dates can be rolling (e.g. 30 days after enrollment) or fixed on a specified date.
• Admins are able to report on the completion status of the content and identify learners who have completed the content late.
• If enabled, learner notifications can also be used to generate reminders about content due dates so learners can stay informed about expectations.
• Enhancements have been made to Panorama authoring and Panorama learner enrollment flows so that this feature can be fully leveraged at both the Main Site and Panorama level.
• Admins will be able to control the rollout to Panorama roles via new permissions.

Enrolled learners will be able to access and complete Assigned Programs just like any other content today. Learners can:

• View due dates on their dashboard learner access widget and the learning path page
• Receive learner notifications (contact your CSM to access this premium feature)
• Complete the learning path before or after the due date

If your organization uses a lot of ILTs or otherwise has unique meeting flows that require you to mark meeting attendance manually, you might find our new meeting attendance APIs helpful! We’ve created new Update Meeting Attendance REST and GraphQL API endpoints that can be used to change attendance for a particular user in a particular meeting. The endpoints work for all meeting types (ILT and VILT with with automated or manual attendance). You can find full API documentation on our REST API and GraphQL pages.

• If you use the Unique Identifier certificate field as a method of validating learner certificates, we’re improving the validation process by exposing this field more conveniently in Reporting Hub. The Unique Identifier field is now visible on the Certificates Log and can be added to the What certificates are being earned? explore.
• Filter the Learner Attended Meetings Log by meeting start date.
• Update to cookie banner behavior - see details below!

The hyperlink to the Thought Industries corporate site privacy policy from the default cookie banner has been removed. The actual default verbiage will remain unchanged:

Who is affected?

This change will only affect your instance if you have enabled the cookie banner but have not changed the default privacy policy link, in which case you’ll need to take action to avoid a broken link with a “page not found” error. See recommended actions below.

On the other hand, if you’ve already customized this banner to remove the link to our site privacy policy and replace it with your own platform privacy policy, then you’re already conforming with best practices and this change will have no impact for your Thought Industries instance.

Recommended actions

If you're using the default cookie banner, we recommend updating the translation to link your platform privacy policy:

• Log in as an admin and navigate to Translations.
• Search for the cookies.statement translation in the General category.
• Edit this translation to link to your privacy policy and make any other edits necessary for your own cookie notice/policy.