Release Notes
January 2025
January 27, 2025
We’re excited to announce that Google Meet is now available as a collaboration provider in ampEducator! This update allows instructors and students to use Google Meet for online meetings, making collaboration even more flexible.
- Multiple Collaboration Providers: Users can now choose between multiple collaboration providers (such as Google Meet and Zoom)
- Google Meet Integration: Instructors can integrate Google Meet for scheduling and hosting virtual meetings. Students can easily access these meetings through the platform.
- Attendance Tracking: Google Meet now supports automatic attendance tracking, ensuring that instructors don’t need to manually check in on participants.
- Instructor Domain Requirement: For Google Meet meetings to work, instructors must have an email address that is part of the same domain as the meetings. For example, if meetings are on @school.com, the instructor’s email must also be @school.com.
- Seamless Collaboration: The integration works similarly to Zoom – simply navigate to User Name / Institution Config / General / Collaboration. Select Google Meet as the meeting provider and follow the instructions to configure it. Once configured, instructors can easily choose the provider to schedule and host virtual sessions when creating a new collaboration.
- The student view for collaboration sessions has been updated to make it more user-friendly and intuitive. The Launch button now replaces the previous Link icon and will be disabled until 5 minutes before the meeting starts.
- A View Recordings button has been added for when meeting recordings are available.
Note: While Google Meet does not yet have features like auto-recording, we are continuously working on improvements.
January 21, 2025
We’ve rolled out several updates to improve grading efficiency, provide more control, and enhance the student experience:
- Organize grade items into customizable groups
- Set individual weights for each grade item, with automatic calculations for relative and absolute weights
- Track dropped grades with the Take Best option
- Easily categorize grade items and track group totals
- A new Clock icon tracks the history of each grade, including date, user, grade changes, and comments
- View all updates made to a student’s grade for greater transparency
- Grade Items are automatically categorized under their respective Grade Groups for clearer organization
- Error alerts prevent you from assigning more weight than is possible for a group
- Assessments and Resources have been grouped for easier navigation
- Weighted marks are now displayed more clearly, and students can see which grades have been dropped in grade groups using the Take Best option
- Grade group configurations are now available in Course Templates, making it easy to apply your grading structure to new courses
These updates enhance grading and course management, improving both instructor workflows and student experience.
