New Releases
Posted August 21, 2012 by Stefan Leyhane
We released an update last night that includes improvements for our clients who collect taxes when people purchase their courses or memberships to their course libraries.
Taxes are complicated
Tax calculation is more complicated than you’d think. Taxes are sometimes calculated based on the purchaser’s address and sometimes based on the course’s location. If you offer registration options, like a course manual or accommodation to go with some instructor-led training, the taxes that apply to those options may differ from the ones that apply to the course itself.
In some areas, such as Quebec in Canada, you have taxes which are cumulative. QST is applied to the price of the product or service after GST is applied.
Often, taxes are only charged if the purchaser is located within a particular area. If you’re based in Australia, you might only need to charge GST to people who live there. All others don’t pay any tax.
Rest assured, Firmwater LMS supports all these scenarios.
Recent improvements
Our latest update includes the following improvements:
1. You can now select the tax schedule to use when setting a price.
If you have one or more tax schedules defined, you can now specify which one to use (or none) when setting a price for a course, registration option, or membership type.
2. Calculated taxes are now shown on all pages before payment.
- Course registration pages
- Membership sign-up page
- Membership renewal page
- Administrator’s pages for creating, renewing, or editing a user’s membership
We hope you find these improvements useful. If you have any questions or need help setting up tax collection for your courses, please get in touch with us.
Posted July 26, 2012 by Stefan Leyhane
We added a new option today to allow your users to use email addresses to log in to the system instead of usernames.
With all the Web sites that you need to access these days, it’s often difficult to remember your username — especially when someone has gotten your preferred username before you. Since email addresses are unique, the task is more straightforward. You often want to collect the email address of your users anyway, so using it to log in means one less field they have to fill in.
Here’s how to switch to use email addresses
- From the ‘Configuration’ tab, navigate to the ‘Settings’ page.
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Switch to edit ‘Accounts and Access’ from the drop-down menu (top-right).
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Select ‘Login with an email address’ under the ‘Usernames’ heading. Click the ‘Save Changes’ button at the bottom of the page.
If you have existing users in the organization, you can only make this change if all users have valid email addresses. You’ll be prompted to confirm the change.
Once the setting is changed, you’ll see your login page requires an email address instead of a username.
We’re now using this setting as our default for all new clients. We hope you find it useful too!
Posted April 23, 2012 by Stefan Leyhane
Hot on the heels of editing attempts and scoring settings in bulk, you can now edit presentation settings in bulk.
Presentation settings determine some of the behavior and navigation of content — especially for tests and surveys — when users interact with it. The settings control things such as time limits, whether to allow suspend and resume, and determine the feedback presented. This new feature makes life easier for our clients with large content libraries who customize the course behavior for each of their clients.
Editing settings
- Select one or more of your courses from the ‘Activities’ page in the ‘Content’ tab and select the ‘Presentation’ operation.
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A pop-up dialog is displayed. Select the type of item that you’d like to change.
Courses can contain lots of items within them (such as pre-tests, lessons, and study guides). Settings are applied to items of a specific type. So you can change the settings for all your pre-tests in one operation.
- After selecting a type, the settings are enabled and show the current state for the selected items. If a mix of values exist, that is conveyed. Make your changes and click the ‘Save Changes’ button.
- After the changes are made, the dialog is dismissed and feedback is presented. The feedback includes a link to undo the changes.
Enjoy!
Posted April 11, 2012 by Stefan Leyhane
Some of our clients have large content libraries and customize the course behavior for each of their clients. We’ve now made this much easier.
One particular client has hundreds of courses in their library. Each course contains about 30 hours of training material but includes a pre-test so that users who know the material can test out. When a new client signs up, they configure the passing score required to test out and, in some cases, the number of attempts allowed at it based on the client’s requirements.
We’ve always allowed you to modify these settings on a course by course basis. In our most recent release, we now make it simple for you to edit these settings in bulk.
Here’s how you do it
- Select one or more of your courses from the ‘Activities’ page in the ‘Content’ tab and select the ‘Attempts and scoring’ operation.
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A pop-up dialog is displayed. Select the type of item that you’d like to change.
Courses can contain lots of items within them (such as pre-tests, lessons, and study guides). Settings are applied to items of a specific type. So you can change the settings for all your pre-tests in one operation.
- After selecting a type, the settings are enabled and show the current state for the selected items. If a mix of values exist, that is conveyed. Make your changes and click the ‘Save Changes’ button.
- After the changes are made, the dialog is dismissed and feedback is presented. The feedback includes a link to undo the changes.
The ‘Attempts and scoring’ operation is also available when looking at all courses that have a specific tag applied. If your course library is segmented into series or by publisher, this makes it really easy to change all the settings for your groups of courses.
For those of you with large content libraries, we hope this addition is useful!
Posted February 22, 2012 by Stefan Leyhane
We’ve added proctoring capabilities in our latest release. You can now designate any launchable item as requiring a proctor be present before it can be launched.
Some of our clients want to ensure that their course post-tests or exams are taken in a controlled environment — or at least confirm the user taking the test is in fact the actual person. Here’s how it works:
Designate an item as requiring a proctor
- From the ‘Content’ tab, go to the course summary page.
- Click on the item that you’d like to require a proctor for.
- From the item’s summary page, click ‘Edit’.
- Switch to the ‘Attempts and Scoring’ page.
- Check off the new ‘Require proctor’ option and click ‘Save Changes’.
Launching the proctored item
When a user tries to launch the item, she is presented with a dialog indicating that an administrator is required to authorize the launch.
Any administrator that has the user in scope can authorize the launch by entering their username and password with the following exclusions:
- Users cannot act as a proctor for themselves.
- Report-only administrators cannot act as proctors.
After a proctor has authorized the launch, the dialog indicates that the item can be launched.
Authorization is only good for the next launch of that attempt and has a short expiry time (5 minutes). If a user suspends a proctored item, she will require a proctor’s authorization to resume it.
As an administrator, you can see who acted as a proctor for a user’s attempts at an item on the Attempts page.
More coming
The work we’ve done so far handles the single computer scenario well. This is where the student and proctor both use a shared computer. We plan on adding some more administrative functionality to deal with the classroom environment as well.
We’d love to hear your feedback on how this works for you! Enjoy.
Posted April 29, 2011 by Stefan Leyhane
We released some enhancements this morning that help you manage the Continuing Education credits earned when your courses are taken. If you provide completion certificates when users successfully complete your courses, the credits earned are listed on the certificates.
This morning’s enhancements allow you to define the credit types that are available and to assign credits against your courses. Here’s a quick overview of how to use the new functionality:
Define Continuing Education credit types
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Enable ‘Continuing Education Credits’ functionality for your organization from the Settings page.
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With the functionality turned on, you’ll see a new ‘Credit Types’ menu for the Configuration tab. This page shows you all the Continuing Education credit types that are available for an organization.
You can add new types and, if you have more than one defined, you can drag to set the order that they are displayed in.
Assign credits to your courses
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To assign credits to one of your courses, go to the course summary page and click the ‘Edit’ link.
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Switch to the ‘Credits and Certificate’ page.
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Assign values to one or more of the listed credit types and click the ‘Save Changes’ button.
It’s as simple as that. You’ll now see the credits listed on the course summary page. If completion certificate access is enabled, the certificates will include information about the credits earned.
We’ve got some more enhancements planned to expose more information about the Continuing Education credit earned by users in reports, so stay tuned. Enjoy!
Posted March 10, 2011 by Stefan Leyhane
We just released the first phase of some work we’re doing on adding more email capability to the system. We have plans for adding a number of different email notifications but the first allows you to send welcome messages to your users. This is good way to introduce new users to your program or course and provide them with a link that allows them to set their password and access the system.
How to send messages
Welcome messages can be sent or resent one at a time or in bulk.
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Use the new ‘Send welcome message’ action from the user summary page. The user must have a well-formed email address for the action to be enabled.
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Select one or more users from the users list page and use the ‘Send welcome message’ operation.
If you’ve setup a new client, have assigned content to the users and are ready to go live, this is a good way to send messages to all the users.
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You can also send welcome messages to new users when importing a list of users. Enable the ‘Send users a welcome message’ checkbox on the confirmation page.
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If you allow users to signup and create their own accounts, you can have a welcome message sent to new users when this happens.
Configuring your emails
You can configure which emails are turned on for any of your clients from the Support and Email Settings page. You can also specify the email’s sender name and reply to address. In the future, this is also where you’ll edit the content of the emails if you want to customize them. We haven’t added that capability yet. Until then, if you want a custom message, just let us know and we’ll be happy to configure it for you.
High deliverability
Our email infrastructure is designed for high deliverability so emails should avoid junk filters and make it through to your users’ inboxes. It is also designed to scale, as we expect to send tens of thousands of emails each month.
We’re excited to build on this first phase of email capability. We hope you like it.
Posted November 18, 2010 by Stefan Leyhane
Just a quick note to say that we added support for meeting password complexity requirements early this morning in a new release of our LMS.
You’ve always had the option of enforcing a minimum password length and requiring users to change their password after a certain number of days. Now you can require that their password meet other criteria.
To start, we have two options:
- No complexity requirements (default)
- Start with letter, and contain at least one number and one special character
You can set the password settings on the Accounts and Access page.
We’re able to add other complexity requirements so if one of your clients or prospects has a specific requirement, let us know!
Posted September 3, 2010 by Stefan Leyhane
Early yesterday morning we deployed a new version of our LMS to production. We’ve moved to a model where we’re doing smaller, more frequent releases. The hope is that, with less changes in each, we’ll have less testing to do per release and you’ll see more frequent improvements. In the version deployed yesterday, there are two main new features:
Assign content based on language or membership type
Membership registration
We added two new filter options to assignments. You can now create rules to deliver content to users based on the membership type of a user or on the user’s language. Of course, you’ll only see these new options for clients that have membership enabled or support multiple languages.
Membership registration
You can now designate specific membership types that allow self-registration. When enabled, each membership type will have its own registration page. By visiting the page, a user can create and pay for membership when signing up for an account.
And, paired with the new assignment membership type filter, new members who register will be able to access training content immediately.
To see all bug fixes and features in the release, please see the release notes for Version 2.14.
Posted July 12, 2010 by Stefan Leyhane
Early this morning, we deployed a new version of our LMS to our production site. Along with several bug fixes, there are over a dozen new features in the release. We hope you find them useful. Here are the highlights:
New help documentation
Help documentation
Search across clients
Assessment presentation settings
We’ve completely revamped the help documentation that is available from within the LMS. This was a long process but useful to us as it identified a few areas of our application where we can improve things. There is now complete documentation for both administrators and students. It can be accessed from the ‘Help’ link in the top-right corner of the LMS when you’re logged in (it’s also available on our public site’s support section). The documentation you see from within the LMS depends on your assigned role.
Documentation is an ongoing process so we’ll continue to improve it over time. We also have plans of making the default help page context-sensitive so that it’s determined by which page it was launched from.
Search across all your clients
It was really easy to search for a user within an organization — but not if you didn’t know what organization the user was associated with. Sometimes you may get a support request in the form of a voicemail or in an email which doesn’t give a clue as to the person’s organization.
We recognized that we didn’t have an effective way for administrators to search across all their clients. Given that some of our clients have hundreds of their own clients using our LMS, we needed to do something.
We’ve added a new tab called ‘Search’ which is available, for now, only to Master Administrators (in fact, it is their new default page). It provides a quick way to search for a user or to jump to a client. The page may look a little sparse for now but, don’t worry, we’ve got greater plans for this page coming.
Edit presentation settings of assessments
Our built-in assessment engine offers many presentation options to control the user’s experience when taking a test or survey. You can specify:
- a time limit
- whether users can suspend and resume an attempt
- how users can navigate through questions
- what feedback is displayed
- the information displayed to the user after they complete an attempt
While we’ve always allowed you to control these settings at author-time, we didn’t provide an easy way to update these on the fly. This is now possible. This is especially useful for our clients who share the same test or survey across many clients but want different settings to be used.
Easier updating of your content
Quite often, typos are found or some tweaks are required after you deploy your learning content to a population of users. We’ve made it easier for you to update previously loaded content. There is now a new option on the content loading page which specifies that you want to update the resources of content in place.
Other new features and enhancements
A few more of the new features and enhancements include:
- Ability to display the list of locations as an expandable hierarchy
- Ensure that learning content with long-running videos doesn’t time out
- Complete support for SCORM 2004 roll-up rules
To see all bug fixes and features in the release, please see the release notes for Version 2.13.
Posted December 9, 2009 by Stefan Leyhane
Just a quick note to mention that we’ve added support for Spanish to our LMS. This adds to the existing language support that we have — both for students and administrators — for English and French.
You can choose which languages you’d like to make available for your organization’s users. And, if you’re interested in adding support for another language, please contact us.
Esperamos que te guste!
Posted October 10, 2009 by Stefan Leyhane
It is a long weekend for us here in Canada (Happy Thanksgiving!) and also for those lucky enough in the U.S. to get Columbus Day off on Monday. Perfect time for a new release of our LMS — so we deployed Version 2.12 last night.
This one took a little longer than usual to get out the door, but hopefully it will prove to be worth the wait. We upgraded some of our infrastructure in the process, so we needed to be extra careful to make sure that everything works smoothly. Along with several bug fixes, there are over 20 new features. Here are the highlights:
Custom domains
Interaction Data Report
New file upload interface
We offer our service as a white-label solution. When you offer our LMS to your clients, we want it to appear as if you made it. You control the branding and the terminology used. Your clients see your contact support information and the system can be customized so that emails are sent from your organization.
The final step to completely hide Firmwater from view was to allow you to use your own custom domain. We had done this for a few of our larger clients but it wasn’t easy for us to manage this across a large number of clients. Now we can offer it to everybody.
You can now choose to use your own domain. So, instead of sending out addresses to your clients with ‘lms.firmwater.com’, you can use a URL such as:
‘lms.yourcompany.com’ or ‘portal.yourcompany.com’ (or whatever you’d like).
Note that there is an additional monthly charge to make use of a custom domain. This requires some setup on our part and we incur additional costs to purchase a SSL certificate for your domain and for dedicated IP addresses.
If you’re interested, or for more details, please contact us.
Simpler login URLs
Upgrading our infrastructure has given us some additional capabilities that we didn’t have before. We’ve now been able to simplify the addresses of your login page and those of your clients (the old addresses still work too). You can now just tack on your client ID to the domain used.
If your client’s ID is ‘yourclient’, their login page can now be accessed at ‘lms.firmwater.com/yourclient’. (Previously, you would have to use ‘https://lms.firmwater.com/lms/?cid=yourclient’.)
This works if you’re using a custom domain as well. Your client’s login page would be accessed at ‘lms.yourcompany.com/yourclient’.
Improved reporting
Reporting now uses an updated platform, allowing for better support from all browsers and, in many cases, improved report execution times. Users will no longer experience application time outs while interacting with reports for long periods of time. We’ve also organized the list of reports into menus to make it easier to find similar reports.
Along with making improvements to several of the existing reports, we also added two new reports:
- Interaction Data Report: Export of the SCORM interaction data saved per user attempt. Some content saves question response data to the LMS through this mechanism.
- Location List: Lists all locations and the number of users for each.
Other new features and enhancements
A few more of the new features and enhancements include:
- Support for taxes when making purchases through the LMS.
- Importing of locations, departments, job titles.
- An improved file upload interface.
We hope you enjoy all the new features. To see everything that’s new, see the release notes for Version 2.12.
Posted June 21, 2009 by Stefan Leyhane
Tonight we released Version 2.11 of our LMS. This release adds a couple of features to our built-in assessment engine. While the features were added to meet the requirements of a new client of ours, they are features that were on our list of things to do and ones that benefit everyone.
Time limited assessments
Assessments can now have time limits. You can specify how long a user has to complete the assessment. The current time remaining is displayed to the user on every screen. When the time exceeds 5 minutes, it is updated once per minute. This approach is taken so the user can focus on responding to the questions and to minimize the distraction provided by the countdown clock.
When the time remaining is less than 5 minutes, it is updated once per second.
If the user doesn’t complete the assessment within the allotted time, the assessment is automatically submitted (after notifying the user appropriately).
Our assessment engine natively supports the IMS Question and Test Interoperability (QTI) Version 1.2.1 standard. QTI allows durations to be specified at the assessment level. When authoring in QTI, you just need to add a ‘duration’ element as a child of the ‘assessment’ element. The format follows ISO 8601 for durations. As an example, 30 minutes would be represented as:
<duration>PT30M</duration>
Shuffing of responses
We also added support for shuffling of responses within an assessment. We’ve had the ability to shuffle questions — so that the order of questions are randomized for each attempt — since our first release but we weren’t able to randomize the responses within a question.
Now we can, and as QTI allows, you can choose which questions you want the responses shuffled for. Within each question, you can specify whether to shuffle all responses or only some of the responses. This is useful for when you may want to shuffle all the responses except the last “All of the above” type response.
Need help? Just ask!
If you have any questions about how to take advantage of these new capabilities, please don’t hesitate to ask us. To see everything in the new release, see the release notes for Version 2.11.
Posted May 15, 2009 by Stefan Leyhane
We released Version 2.10 of our LMS last night. Here’s an overview of the new features included.
Completion certificates
sample completion certificate
This feature has come up quite a few times when talking to prospects. We’ve also heard that it would be useful to some of our existing clients so we decided to add support for it. Firmwater LMS can now generate a completion certificate for a user who has successfully completed an activity. The certificate can be customized for an organization.
You can pick and choose which of your activities that you’d like completion certificates to be available for. We’ve made this easy by allowing you to specify this individually or as a bulk operation on a group of activities.
Some organizations allow their students to print their own certificates, while others only allow administrators to print them. We let you decide who has access.
See the documentation for more details.
Individual Response Report
Individual Response Report
Administrators can now see a report that shows a user’s attempt at an assessment. The report is generated as a PDF and shows score information along with all the questions and responses with correct answers highlighted. This is accessible to administrators when drilling into a user’s training plan.
Other new reports
We also added a few new reports that might come in handy. Much of this information is available through the user interface too but it’s useful to be able to generate a report and be able to export the data to different formats.
The new reports are:
- Clients List: Available to master administrators, this lists all clients and the number of users for each.
- Users List: Lists all users. When exported to CSV or XML, all user fields are included. This is good way to get a CSV file to use to import back into the system.
- Activities List: Lists all activities, can be filtered by tag.
We hope you enjoy the changes. To see everything that’s new, see the release notes for Version 2.10.
Posted February 4, 2009 by Stefan Leyhane
We released Version 2.9 of our LMS yesterday. The elusive 3.0 release is not far away but we wanted to get out some of the improvements we’ve made.
Importing users much improved
