What is new?

August 2024

  • 08/13 We added a Grade Note field to the student class enrollment record. The system automatically populates this field when assigning final grades to students to explain why the student got their grade when that grade is counter intuitive. Suppose for example that a student has a passing average that would warrant a B but did not meet the minimum required average in a specific assignment category and that furthermore you have configured the system to assign a D in such a scenario: the system will assign a D to the student but then add the following text to the grade note field: Student did not meet the aa% minimum in xxx where aa is the minimum required average in the assignment category and xxx is the name of the assignment category. This field can also be manually edited by instructors. Students can see this field when they log in via their portal.

May 2024

  • 05/07 Instructors can now see the status of a student in their class when they click on the student

April 2024

  • 04/16 We added a new D2L Grades Import batch import which imports into College Office final grades from D2L Brightspace.
  • 04/16 We added a new Set Online Access batch import which lets a registrar use a batch files to enable or disable students online access.

March 2024

  • 03/09 We deployed 2 new reports to help audit who has downloaded which documents within a time period and who has accessed which reports within a time period: Reports Audit and Downloads Audit under the Auditing category.

February 2024

  • 02/18 Added a Use Financial Module check box to the My Institution configuration screen. This is is set to Yes by default, but when set to No it prevents students from seeing any financial information from College Office. This is useful for institutions which do not use College Office to manage students financial records.
  • 02/08 Modified the unofficial transcript students can print from their portal so that it would exclude data from any term marked as not visible to students.

January 2024

December 2023

  • 12/19 We added a new Class Schedule batch import.
  • 12/06 Cosmetic changes
  • 12/06 We have improved the Student batch import.

November 2023

  • 11/13 Migrated web address from collegeoffice.com to login.collegeoffice.com and collegeoffice.net to login.collegeoffice.net`

October 2023

Improvements
  • 10/23 Minor improvements.
  • 10/11 Migrated the application to a new dedicated server with greater capacity.

May 2023

Improvements
  • 05/23 It is now possible to add a custom note that will be printed at the bottom of all student transcripts in a small (8pt) italic font. This transcript note is edited from the Custom page of the My Institution screen: look for the Student Transcript Note field in the REPORTS category.

February 2023

Improvements
  • 02/06 It is now possible to brand the emails sent by College Office with your institution's logo and name. Go to the My Institution screen (from the Home page click the Setup button on the lower right of the screen, then click the My Institution button), select the Custom page and look for the Include Institution Logo field in the EMAIL category. If you set it to Yes all emails sent from College Office will include a header with your institution's logo and name.
  • 02/06 The email signature (a text of your choice which is automatically appended to the bottom of all emails sent by College Office) is now edited from the Custom page of the My Institution screen: look for the Signature field in the EMAIL category.

January 2023

Bug Fixes
  • 01/06 Fixed an issue with the Online Registration module.

December 2022

Improvements
  • 12/05 We improved our automatic billing. Customers will now automatically receive their monthly invoice on the 1st of the following month.
  • 12/01 We added tools to manage our new monthly billing. Check the Understanding Your Bill help topic to learn how you can view your invoices and get the billing details.
Bug Fixes
  • 12/17 We fixed a bug in the automatic monthly billing of our customers.

November 2022

Improvements
  • 11/29 Improved the students batch import process to include program and specialization information.

October 2022

Improvements
  • 10/06 Performance improvements.
Bug Fixes
  • 10/02 The list of documents of a student could take a long time to display: this has been corrected. We have also modified the GUI: documents in the Documents page of the Student screen are now listed in rows rather than in tiles: click on the name of the document to retrieve it, click anywhere else on the row to edit the row information.
  • 10/01 Corrected an issue whereby downloading documents from College Office generated an error.

September 2022

New Features & Improvements
  • 09/13 A registrar can now choose the password when creating an individual online account for a new user. Leaving the password blank causes College Office to automatically generate a random password.
  • 09/13 College Office will now force users to change their password the first time they login after their password has been assigned or changed by the registrar office.
Bug Fixes
  • 09/13 We have fixed several issues related to the online registration process.
  • 09/13 College Office would sometimes hang up when deleting a user account: this has been fixed.

August 2022

New Features & Improvements
  • 08/03 We have released new video tutorials for instructors.
  • 08/03 We have made some important internal changes in view of forth coming features.

July 2022

Bug Fixes
  • 07/09 Filtering financial transactions was not working properly. This has been fixed.

June 2022

New Features & Improvements
  • 06/26 You can now use the online registration feature even without a payment processor: in this scenario students can register online without making any online payment.
  • 06/26 You can choose to be notified by email whenever a student registers online or makes a change to his or her registration: enter the email address to which the online registration notifications should be sent in the Registration Notification Email field which is found on the Custom page of the My Institution screen. Leave the field empty if you do not wish to receive notifications.
  • 06/26 You can now add or remove roles from a user directly from the Person screen without needing to open the Edit Person screen.
  • 06/20 We have released new video tutorials detailing the setup/configuration process.
  • 06/20 We made the following adjustments based on customer feedback following the June 11th release:
    • You can select how College Office should handle past due bills when students register online via 2 new settings in the My Institution screen:
      • Ignore Past Due Bill: choose Yes if College Office should ignore past due bills when students register online, otherwise College Office will add any past due bill to the payment due at registration time.
      • Max Past Due Bill Ignored: when Ignore Past Due Bill is set to Yes you can set here the maximum amount that College Office will ignore. Students with a past due bill greater than this amount will not be able to register online. This value is ignored when Ignore Past Due Bill is set to No.
    • We improved the Payment Plans scheduling so that you can specify for example 'every 3 weeks' or 'every 2 months' instead of just 'Weekly' or 'Monthly'.
    • We have reworked the layout of the Edit Term screen by grouping all the fields related to online registration and payment plans on a dedicated Registration page.
    • Check the updated video:
    • We added a new Award Date parameter to the main Student Transcript report which can be set to either Show based on the status of the student program record and the graduation date (default) if the award date should only be printed when the status of the student in his/her program of study has the Graduated check box checked (see the Student Program Statuses section in the Statuses... help topic) and the graduation date is in the past, or Show based on the graduation date only when the award date should be printed if the graduation date is in the past regardless of the student program status.
  • 06/11 College Office can now automatically create payment plans for students when they register online using the method of payment the student selected for their initial payment. College Office will also automatically update the payment plan when a student modifies their registration choices. Payments received from the payment plans are automatically inserted into College Office the day they settle. The registrar sets for each term the date of the first payment as well as the number and interval of payments via the Edit Term screen. Users with the Financial role can also manually create payment plans or cancel existing payment plans. There is a lot to this new feature, check our updated Online Registration help topic as well as the videos below:
  • 06/11 Students can now see the costs of registration and classes before choosing classes when they register online.
  • 06/11 We have modified the way College Office manages repeat grades. You can configure College Office to automatically manage which grade is valid via a new dedicated setting Repeat Grades Management in the My Institution screen. In the new design, the Replaced flag is only set once the final grade of the repeated class has been recorded. This is a change of behavior when College Office used to mark all former class enrollments as Replaced as soon as a student was enrolled to repeat a class. The choices are:
    • Do not let College Office manage this, in which case you must manually set the Replaced flag of Student Class Enrollment records of repeated classes.
    • Tell College Office to automatically use the best grade as the valid grade.
    • Tell College Office to automatically use the most recent grade as the valid grade (default setting unless you change it).
  • 06/11 We added a Graduated check box to the Student Program Status. In order for the Student Transcript to show that a student graduated from a program of study, the student program record must be linked to a graduation with a date in the past AND have a Student Program Status for which Graduated is checked.
  • 06/11 We have made it easier to see a student balance, either from the Student screen or from the Student Financial Records screen. Furthermore, just clicking the balance on the Student screen redirects you to the Student Financial Records screen as an alternative to clicking the Finances button on the lower right.
  • 06/11 You can now define a template of all your academic term fees under the My Institution screen. When a new academic term is created it will automatically be populated with all the fees (per credit, per audit, registration, late registration...) defined in your template. You can then modify these fees as needed or add new ones.
  • 06/11 We have made some cosmetic changes that correct some rendering issues in some browser configurations.
Changes
  • 06/11 We have removed the Term Type field in Term and the Payment Method field in Transaction. Those fields were obsolete and unnecessary. We have transferred any existing Payment Method information into the Note field of the Transaction and any existing Term Type information into the Note field of the Term.
  • 06/11 Discount Rules are now accessed from Home Page -> Finances -> Discount Rules
  • 06/11 We are discontinuing for now support for Braintree Payments. The only fully supported payment platform is Authorize.net
  • The Online Payment, Online Registration and Payment Plan features are now available for no added cost to all our customers.
Bug Fixes
  • 06/20 The input date fields did not allow recording dates beyond December 31st 2030. This has been corrected.
  • 06/11 In the rare situation where a registrar deletes a class, the Replaced flag of student class enrollment records where students repeat a class may be affected. College Office will now correct this situation automatically during its nightly cleanup. The user can also initiate this process earlier by running Recompute.

March 2022

Improvements
  • 03/05 You can now set the default format used by College Office when suggesting or creating a username as either a concatenation of the 1st letter of the first name plus the last name purged of any special characters plus a number if required (in case username already exists) or as the user primary email address. This setting determines the username suggested by College Office when creating an online account for a single user or the usernames created by College Office when creating online accounts for all the students of a term at once from the Term screen. You can configure this value from the Settings page of the My Institution screen.
  • 03/05 The student primary email and optionally mobile number (if allowed by user) is now more easily accessible to instructors & registrars.
Reports
  • 03/05 The People Directory Report has been modified to include more information.
  • 03/05 We added a new report Students Term Program Directory similar to the Students Term Directory but with added programs information and filtering options.

February 2022

Improvements
  • 02/19 The Last Login and Last Password Change date & time values in the Person screen should now display in the time zone of your local computer. We will expand this to more date & time fields in the future.
  • 02/19 We added a new setting Teachers See Closed Terms in the My Institution screen that lets you decide if instructors can see their classes from closed terms (without the possibility of making any change) or if closed terms are hidden to them. Since instructors were formerly not able to see closed terms, that setting is by default set to No unless you change it.

January 2022

Documentation
Improvements
  • 01/26 Added a field that helps match a Student Status with a [role] in D2L Brightspace.
  • 01/26 The system now automatically recomputes all calculated fields of all open terms every night. Though calculated fields are automatically updated in the background as users do data entry, it could happen in very rare occasions that some calculated fields got out of sync: this change addresses this issue.
  • 01/26 When initiating a re-computation of all calculated fields, the user can now choose between Recompute All Terms or Recompute Open Terms Only. See the Recompute help topic.
  • 01/08 Students can now see their default virtual room directly from the class screen.
Bug Fixes
  • 01/08 Corrected a bug whereby students were able to print reports for terms marked as Hidden to students.
  • 01/02 Corrected a bug in the Student Online Registration module whereby in rare situations a student could be charged twice.

October 2021

Improvements
  • 10/30 The data of our European customers in now stored in a data center in Germany and the web address of College Office for our European customers is collegeoffice.net. The data of our North American customers remains stored in a data server in the USA and the web address of College Office for our North American customers remains collegeoffice.com.
  • 10/15 Improved the auditing of deleted records.
  • 10/15 Improved the D2L reports.
Bug Fixes
  • 10/30 Corrected a bug whereby the system was not taking into account the number of credits transferred when automatically setting the student Grade Level.

September 2021

Bug Fixes
  • 9/24 Fixed issue in sending emails.
  • 9/20 Compressing and encrypting backups larger than 4GB was failing. This has been corrected, but you must now use the 64 bits version of 7-Zip or WinZip to decompress and decrypt your backup file.

August 2021

Improvements
  • 8/14 We have redesigned the way your data is backed up, compressed, encrypted and made available to you. An Administrator can download the latest backup of your data from the My Institution screen. You can also configure College Office to automatically upload the encrypted backup of your data to an FTP or SFTP server of your choice. See the help topic Backing Up and Restoring College Office Data for details. Note that the My Institution screen is now only accessible to users with the Administrator role. Users with the Registrar role used to be able to view it but not change it, but they can now no longer view it.
Bug Fixes
  • 8/17 Minor fix after 8/14 release.
  • 8/30 Fixed issue with online registration when student username was greater than 10 characters.

July 2021

Bug Fixes
  • 7/17 Corrected the following bug: deleting a student record sometimes failed.

June 2021

New Features
  • 6/23 You can now automatically create online accounts for all the students of a term who do not already have one. The system will automatically create a username and a password for each of these students, email them their credentials and assign them the Student role. See the Online Access and the Term help topics.
Improvements
  • 6/23 We have simplified the way a user can change their own password and we added a confirmation email to the process.
  • 6/23 When resetting the password of a user, a registrar can either let the system automatically generate a new random password (as previously,) or assign a specific password (that's new.).
  • 6/21 We added a Student Not Attending flag to the Student Status. Students with a status where this flag is set to Yes will be considered as not attending classes when generating certain reports. This flag is currently used when generating export reports for D2L Brightspace.

May 2021

Improvements
  • 5/4 The Person screen now shows if a user/person is locked out as well as the date & time (GMT) the user/person last logged into the system and last changed his/her password.

April 2021

Improvements
  • 4/30 We have improved the Students import type so that it can be run to update the information of existing students in College Office from the data in the batch import file. For this feature to work each person must be assigned a unique Student ID both in College Office and in the batch import file. The import process compares the Student ID in College Office and in the batch file to determine that a student already exists or not and that the batch data for this student should be used to update the existing student record rather than create a new one. If you do not want a specific field in College Office to be overridden just make sure that the corresponding data is blank in the batch file.
  • 4/30 We can now easily add custom fields to the Student screen upon request from our customers. This feature already existed for the Person, Program, Term and Course screens, but has now been added to the Student screen. Contact us if you need custom fields added to any of these screens.
  • 4/26 The Students import type has been modified to also import the secondary email field Email 2.
  • 4/26 We added a Student On Hold flag to the Student Status. Students with a status where this flag is set to Yes will be considered on hold (for example because of unpaid bills) when generating certain reports. This flag is currently used when generating export reports for D2L Brightspace.

February 2021

New Features
  • 2/16 We are beta testing a new feature that lets users scan documents directly into College Office from a local scanner connected to their computer. Contact us us if you would like to try it and we will enable it for your institution. See the Upload a Document help topic for more details and check the list of compatible scanners.
Improvements
  • 2/20 Users can individually turn off the the option to scan documents directly into College Office is they do not want to install on their computer the small utility required for this feature to function.
  • 2/20 Institutions can set via the My Institution screen if users can edit their primary email address and/or their secondary email address via the Edit My Profile screen.

January 2021

New Features
  • 1/23 We added a new Subscription feature that lets you subscribe to certain reports that can be exported as a CSV, PDF, Word or Excel file to a FTP or SFTP site on a user defined schedule. Files can optionally be zipped before being exported. See the Subscriptions and Task Schedules help topics for more details. This feature is currently used by one of our customers to automatically export College Office data as CSV files to the SFTP site of their D2L Brightspace learning management system which can then automatically import those files. Contact us if you need us to create reports for your institution that can similarly be run as a subscription.
  • 1/23 We added 2 new reports under the Schedule report category that let you identify student schedule conflicts:
    • Schedule Conflict Details shows all occurrences of schedule conflicts for students during a given term
    • Schedule Conflicts shows students with class enrollment records that generate one or more schedule conflict during the selected term.
Improvements
  • 1/30 We improved the newly released Subscription feature by letting the user add a manifest file to the uploaded file if needed.
  • 1/30 The system now lets you to create classes with dates that fall outside the term dates (but you will get a warning.)
  • 1/30 We have made it easier to rename documents stored in College Office which are linked to student or class records.
  • 1/30 PDF, JPG, PNG & TXT files stored in College Office are now directly displayed in the browser, other document types are downloaded. Note that documents directly displayed in the browser can still be downloaded from the browser (usually by right clicking and selecting Save As....)
  • 1/30 Minor cosmetic improvements to the online registration process.
  • 1/30 The system now automatically sends a payment acknowledgment email when students make a payment via College Office.
  • 1/23 College Office now sets automatically the Repeat and Replaced flags of Student Class enrollment records as you enroll student in classes.
  • 1/23 We added a Repeated flag to Course records. Set it to "Yes" to indicate that it is normal for this course to be repeated several times by a student. The default value is "No", but if set to "Yes" College Office will not set the Repeat and Replaced flags of student class enrollment records for that course. See the Edit Course help topic.
  • 1/23 We made some improvements to the online payment when registering online:
    • You can set a minimum amount so that the system will not process online payments for an amount less than this minimum. Go to My Institution -> Custom page and look for the Minimum Amount field in the Online Payments category.
    • The system will automatically apply any credit the student has to the online registration bill and to the amount of the initial payment due at registration.
    • The system will add any past due amount to the initial payment due at registration.
    • On top of personal student discounts that can be added from the Student Financial Records screen, you can also create Discount Rules that are automatically applied to students at registration time. There are currently 2 rules available (see the Discount Rules help topic for more details:
      • An age based rule lets you set a discount for student younger or older than a certain age.
      • A Pay In Full rule lets you set a discount for students who pay in full at registration time.
  • 1/23 We made some improvements to the Batch Import process. The Parsed Data page of the Import Document screen has been streamlined. Just click on a line to view and edit the content of that line. It is now much easier to check the validity of the data or to manually correct some erroneous data before finalizing the import.
  • 1/23 Minor changes
    • We added a Secondary Email field to Person records.
    • We added a Code field to the Departments which is used when generating certain custom reports.
Bug Fixes
  • 1/30 Fixed a couple bugs in the Online Registration module.

December 2020

New Features
Improvements
  • We improved the recently added Class Enrollments Import Type that lets you import student class enrollment records into College Office so that it would automatically set the Repeat flag of newly imported records and the Replaced flags of past records which are repeated by a newly imported record.

November 2020

New features
  • We added a new Class Enrollments Import Type that lets you import student class enrollment records into College Office from a 3rd party application that can export a spreadsheet with the Student ID, First Name, Last Name, Course Code and Class Section.

September 2020

Improvements
  • We have redesigned the Online Registration module that was introduced in June to include automatic billing and online payment at the time of registration. Check the Online Registration topic in the Knowledge Base. This feature is optional: Contact us if you would like to subscribe.
  • We added a new Audit/Credit field to the Student Term enrollment record which is used to indicate if the student is a Credit Student or an Audit Student during the term. College Office automatically maintains this field as students get enrolled in classes. Run Recompute (Setup -> Tools -> Recompute) in order to set the value of this field for past term enrollment records.
  • College Office will automatically prevent a student from being enrolled twice in the same class.
  • When importing a batch of records into College Office you can now override the default Field Separator, End Of Line identifier and Ignore First Line flag for each document/file you import. Check the Batch Imports help topic.
Bug Fixes
  • The class size was not being updated when students were added to the class.

July 2020

New Features
  • We added a new tool that lets an Administrator substitute a course for another course in all the past classes and student records of your institution. See the Replace Course by Another Course help topic. In the process we also moved the Recompute tool under the new Tools menu.
Improvements
  • Users can now choose between a Desktop Optimized and a Smartphone Optimized display. From the Home Screen, click your name on the upper left to access My Profile. Click the edit button on the lower right and set your preference in the Edit My Profile screen ( Watch the video.) The main difference is that the Desktop Optimized display uses more traditional tables (read from top to bottom) which do not always show well on small screens while the Smartphone Optimized display uses more tiles which show very well on small screens but are read from left to right. Only a limited number of screens are affected by the setting.

June 2020

New Features
  • We have released a new Student Online Registration module which lets your students register for their classes from the student portal and guides them based on the curriculum of their program(s) of study and the courses they have already passed. Check the Online Registration screen in the student portal and the Edit Term screen in the Administration portal. Watch the video. This feature is optional, Contact us if you would like to subscribe.
Improvements
  • We have redesigned many parts of the application layout so that it would work well on iPhone and Android smartphones, especially the student and instructor portals, but also the registrar portal.
  • Instructors can be assigned a work phone number which is shown to their students and advisees. Check the Edit Staff Member screen. Note that the instructor's mobile number recorded in the Edit Person screen is never shown to students or advisees.
  • A term can be hidden from students and/or instructors while you are working on it. Check the Edit Term screen.
  • We have redesigned some aspects of the Student portal to give students a better overview of their academic records. Watch the video.
Miscellaneous
  • Student Transcripts II has been renamed Student Transcripts since it is the default & recommended Student Transcript.
Fixes
  • We have corrected issues that prevented certain features from working properly on iPhones & iPads.

May 2020

New Features
  • You can add your own buttons that will appear on the home page of the users belonging to the role(s) you choose to redirect them from within College Office to an external resource on the internet. Watch the video or check the Home Page Links help topic.
  • We added a new import type that lets you import the attendance records of an external attendance tracking system such as AccuClass
Improvements
  • We have redesigned the way the system manages advisers and advisees and made it easier for instructors to see their advisees and for students to see their advisers. Check the the new Advisers page on the Student and Student Term screens. Check also the Advisees screen in the Instructor portal and the Advisers screen in the Student portal.
  • You can now enroll many students at once in a term (see the Students page of the Term screen.) Watch the video!
  • You can now enroll many students at once in a class (see the Students page of the Class screen.) Watch the video!
  • We have made it easier for students to see their class instructors information: name, email and optionally mobile (if the Show Mobile flag in the instructor's Person record is set to Yes.)
  • We have redesigned the multi-select feature that lets you enroll a student in many classes at once to be more robust.
  • We have redesigned the inner workings of the email client that broadcasts messages to students from your own email server so that it would be more robust, with better error reporting and better handling of HTML code. You can also create test emails, search all the emails sent by College Office to identify problems, and access a new error log that specifically reports email configuration errors. Check the Emails and Error Log help topics.
Fixes
  • Fixed a database performance issue (record locking.)
  • Fixed a problem when using the multi-select features to create many classes at once or to enroll a student in many classes at once.
  • Fixed a bug with attendance caused by the April 30th release.
  • Corrected issues with 3 reports caused by the April 30th release: Financial Statements, Student Transcript II, My Gradebook.
  • We have corrected issues with the context-sensitive help system of the student and instructor portals where users were sometimes directed to the wrong help topic.

April 2020

New Features
  • You can now use College Office to manage the online delivery of your classes
    • You can differentiate between Live and Recorded classes. Live classes are delivered via a traditional class schedule. Recorded classes are freely consumed by the students on their own schedule. Watch the video!
    • An instructor can manage class sessions by giving them a title and a description (learning objectives), attaching documents and online resources, tagging assignments due on that session and providing online class meeting access information (such as Zoom) when applicable. Watch the video!
    • A student can easily access from their portal all the information they need for a class session: session title & description, assignments due, documents and online resources, online class meeting access information (such as Zoom) when applicable. Watch the video!
  • Assignments can be made Optional. If an assignment is optional students do not receive an Incomplete for not doing it. If the student does not complete an optional assignment, this assignment is excluded from her final average (she is not penalized,) but if she does the assignment, then it is computed in her final average.
Improvements
  • You can now enroll a student into many classes at once.
  • You can now add many new classes to a term at once.
  • The system will automatically populate the Grade Level of a student when enrolling him or her into a term based upon the number of credits earned. Watch the video!
  • The system will automatically set the First Time status of a student when enrolling him or her into a term.
  • The system can automatically update the Full Time status of a student in a term as the student is being enrolled into or removed from classes if configured to do so. Watch the video!
  • We made it faster to enroll people into lists.
  • We can now add custom fields tailored to the needs of your institution to Courses, Programs and Terms (this is in addition to People and My Institution): contact us if this is something you need.
  • The help system has been revamped is now fully up to date!

March 2020

Improvements
  • Performance improvement when computing the final grades of a class.
  • Performance improvement when working with the grade-book (viewing/recording the student grades of an assignment, adding/deleting/editing an assignment.)
  • You can now set the attendance of all students of a given class session to a specific attendance value at once.

February 2020

Notes
  • We have renamed Messages as Broadcasts.
Improvements
  • Performance improvement when adding, editing or deleting student class records.
  • Performance improvement when viewing the students of a class and the students of a term.
  • You can now delete a broadcast and all its unsent emails (broadcast emails are sent within 5 minutes of creating the broadcast, so only emails with an invalid email address would be left unsent afterwards.)
  • Instructors can now see the mobile number of their students, but we also added a Show Mobile check box on the Person Edit Form which must be set to Yes for the mobile number of that students to be visible to the instructors. This new field can be set either by the registrar or by the students themselves if you have set the Users Edit Their Mobile Number field to Yes in the Settings page of the My Institution screen.
  • We have made many small improvements to the user interface.

January 2020

Improvements
  • We have made it easier to delete a person or a student's records: you no longer need to first delete the student's term records. With ease though comes danger: the system will ask you to confirm twice. Note: deleting a person or student record can take a while.
Notes
  • We have renamed Admissions as Students
  • We have made major background changes to the financial transactions in anticipation of a future release that will deliver new finance related features.
  • The financial transactions of an Admission record or a Student Term record are now accessed via a button with the $ icon which is found on the lower right of the screen.
Reports
  • The new Repeat Students report lists the students of a term who repeat a course along with the course they are repeating.

October 2019

Improvements
  • We improved the performance/speed of the application when taking attendance.
  • Cosmetic improvements
Changes to Reports
  • We replaced the Students Directory by 2 new reports:
    • Students Term Directory, functions as the former Students Directory printing only students of a term
    • Students Global Directory prints all students of the database (students can be filtered by their status and/or gender)

September 2019

New Features
  • We integrated the online payment solution of Braintree Payments into College Office so that your students can now pay their bills online directly from within College Office. Contact us if you would like to implement this feature for your institution.
Improvements
  • We did away with the "tiles" look which did not always render as intended in browsers and replaced it by a classic "table rows" look. Smartphone users will need to use their phone in landscape mode, but desktop users will appreciate the improved productivity.
  • We improved the security and privacy of your data.
  • We added 4 new user roles:
    • Registrar/ReadOnly (Can see everything the Registrar role can see but cannot make any change)
    • Instructor/ReadOnly (Can see everything the Instructor role can see but cannot make any change)
    • Financial (Can view and modify financial records)
    • Financial/ReadOnly (Can see everything the Financial role can see but cannot make any change)
  • The Registrar role no longer has access to financial information: add the Financial/ReadOnly or Financial roles if you need a registrar to view or edit financial information.
  • The Registrar role can only add or remove the Instructor, Instructor/ReadOnly, Student or Print Only roles to or from a user. Any other role can only be added or removed by the Administrator role.
  • Marking a Term as closed used to only prevent instructors from making changes to the grades or attendance of students in the term. We have changed this behavior so that it now prevents any user from making any change: you must first "open" a "closed" term before making any change.
  • We added an Overwrite flag to the grades. This flag is by default set to True: set it to False to indicate this grade should not be overwritten by the system when computing the final grade of a student in a class. We have already set this flag to False for the grades which are marked as Withdraw or Non Credit in your current setup.
  • The Import Patterns available to a user authorized to do batch imports of data into College Office depend on the role of the user: a Financial role can only import batches of financial records, while a Registrar role can only import batches of personal or academic records.
Changes to Reports
  • We added a new Failing Students report
  • The Academic Results report lets you now filter by term rather than an active enrollment date and adds several new filtering options.
  • Student Report Cards: we corrected a bug with the WD (withdraw) status that was at times incorrectly displayed.

July 2019

Changes & Fixes
  • The start and end dates of a student class enrollment record are now both required. The system will assume they are the same as the class start and end date, but either one can be overriden. The system will intelligently propagate changes made to the class start and end date to the student class records start and end dates when applicable.
  • Though it was already possible to assign an end date to a student class enrollment record that is before the class end date, it also now possible to assign a start date to a student class enrollment record that is after the class start date. The system will automatically adjust the student attendance records accordingly.
  • Changes made to a term start or end date will intelligently propagate to classes start or end dates and their related records (schedules, student class enrollment records,...)
  • You can no longer assign a different Class to an existing Student Class record, you should instead delete the record and create a new one with the proper class. This did not make much sense anyway and was creating potential problems.

March 2019

Improvements
  • Minor improvements to the Batch Import feature. The system now displays the date when the batch import was first created and the dates & times when the document was last uploaded & parsed, and when the document was last processed for import. When looking at the parsed data, you can also see when each line was imported and this date & time will match the created date & time of the corresponding College Office record that was created in the database.
Changes to Reports
  • Added more filtering options to the Transactions report
Other
  • We updated the pricing page to reflect a 50% decrease of the data storage fee.
  • We added a new help topic explaining how the data storage space is computed for billing: it only includes external documents which are uploaded to our server when they are attached to classes, student records or emails.

February 2019

Improvements
  • You can attach documents to an email message broadcasted to a target group: for each attached document a hyperlink is added at the bottom of the email that lets the recipient directly download the document from our server. Check the improved Message Edit Form.
    • Warning: any person to whom the links are forwarded will also be able to download these documents!
  • You can add basic HTML formatting to the emails sent from College Office as well as to the email signature of your institution. College Office does not render the HTML tags in the application, but the recipients will receive an HTML formatted text.
  • You can see all the notices to which a person is required to consent in order to use College Office from the improved Person View Form.
  • You can see all the emails sent to a person from the improved Person View Form.
  • Added a Note field to the Admission Status History screen so that a user can enter a note when assigning a new admission status to a student. See improved Status Of Admission Edit Form
Changes to Reports
  • Added a column for class primary instructor in Attendance Report
  • Changed the Student Transcript II report so that is a student is set to graduate at a future graduation date when the report is printed, then the transcript does not show the graduation date nor the credentials awarded. This change means the Show Graduation Date parameter was no longer necessary and has therefore been removed.

January 2019

Improvements
  • We added an Ignore flag to the Admission Status History to indicate that a particular Admission Status History should be ignored by the system when setting the current student admission status and should be ignored by processes which analyze the history of a student admission statuses such for example as the NSLDS report. See the improved Admission Statuses History Form and the Status Of Admission Edit Form.
  • The 'Admissions' batch import template now lets users import the student National ID if available (SSN in the USA)
Changes to Reports
  • Financial Statements have been modified to include a running balance (plus some minor cosmetic changes)

December 2018

Improvements
  • We added various fields that let us create reports for the National Student Loan Data System (NSLDS). Contact us if you need to generate these reports for your institution.
  • We improved Admission Statuses by showing the status effective date and changing the way Admission Statuses are recorded. See the improved Admission View Form.
  • We can now create custom fields upon request in order to adapt to the specific needs of your institution. Contact us for more details.

November 2018

Improvements
  • You can create Notices that College Office users will be required to consent to in order to continue using College Office. The notice is targeted to the specific user roles you select such as Administrator, Registrar, Instructor, Student ... College Office will record the date and time (US EST) that a user has consented to a notice, and you can review the list of users who have consented and not consented. Users can access the list of notices they have consented to from their portal. A possible use of this feature is to require your users to consent to your institution Data Privacy Policy and document when they consented to it. (This is the same feature that we use to require our customers and their users to consent to our legal documents.)
  • Improved auditing of changes in the database.

October 2018

Improvements
  • You can create the classes of a term by duplicating the existing classes of another term with the option of also importing the schedule and/or the instructors of each class. Check the improved Classes page of the Term View Form.
  • Lists can now be marked as active or inactive and can be filtered by name, campus and/or active status. Check the improved Lists and List Edit Form.
  • Only current members of a list are now listed by default, but members can be filtered by date and/or name. Check the improved List View Form.
  • The members of a list can now be imported from another list (you can clone a list). Check the improved List View Form.
  • The texts of the emails for login credentials and password reset requests are now in English, French, and Spanish.
  • Users can optionally upload their profile picture, and/or edit their primary email address, and/or edit their primary phone number via the improved View My Profile screen. Those options are turned on or off via the My Institution Edit Form.
  • We made it easier for Registrars and Advisers to access the student's primary email and primary telephone by displaying them on the Admission View Form and the Term Enrollment View Form. Just click on the student email address to send them an email via your personal default email client software. See the improved Admission View Form and Term Enrollment View Form.
  • Students can be assigned a Term Adviser. There are therefore 3 kinds of advisers a student can have: a global adviser (at the admission record level), a program adviser (at the student program enrollment level) and now a term adviser (at the student term enrollment level). See the improved Term Enrollment View Form, Term Enrollment Edit Form and Staff View Form.
  • Advisers can see their advisees academic data from the instructor's portal. If they are a global or program adviser to the advisee, they can see the entire academic data (all terms) of their advisees. If they are a term adviser to the advisee, they can only see the academic data of the terms for which they are the student adviser. See the improved Instructor Term Screen.
  • We added a new Ok To Email field to the person's record. People for whom this field is set to No will be excluded from any targeted email you send. See the improved Person Edit Form.
  • We added new filtering options when searching for people: on top of the previous options you can also filter on username, on whether people have online access and on whether people can receive emails. See the improved People screen.
  • The Account page of the My Institution screen now displays the email address associated with the iDrive account used to share your daily backup. See the improved My Institution screen.
Changes to Reports
  • Modified the Students Directory report so that when filtering on Delivery Method the report will list students with the selected Delivery Method either at the Term Enrollment level or at the Class level.

September 2018

Improvements
  • We have updated our Privacy Policy to reflect that Semafox is now Privacy Shield certified
  • We created a new batch import type to import Charges & Credits
  • You can print a transaction receipt from any list of financial transactions: click the blue Print link on the right.
  • When broadcasting a message, you can target the recipients by grade level, see the improved Message Edit Form
Changes to Reports
  • You can print a transaction receipt from any list of financial transactions: click the blue Print link on the right.

August 2018

Improvements
  • An instructor can clone the assignments and/or documents of one of their classes to another of their classes in the same term and with the same course: check the import button on the Assignments page of the improved Class View Form.
  • Instructors can now view and edit the note/memo field of a student enrollment record in their class
  • Instructors can now view the student email address from the Class Student Screen and send an email by clicking on it.
  • Added a feature that lets an administrator reset the assignment types of a class or of all the classes of a term, to conform to the current default values of the assignment types. Check the improved Assignment Types screen.
  • New Attendance Report which shows the attendance of all the students of a class for all sessions and which can be printed, along with the Grade book Report, directly from the Print button of the Class View Form
Changes to Reports
  • Added a new parameter the various class roster reports so that you can choose to hide from the roster the students who have withdrawn from the class before the date on which you print the report. The affected reports are: Class Roster, Class Roster With Contact Info, Attendance Collection Form (Single Session) and any custom class roster report developed for certain institutions.
  • New Attendance Report which shows the attendance of all the students of a class for all sessions and which can be printed, along with the Grade book Report, directly from the Print button of the Class View Form

July 2018

Improvements
  • College Office will now automatically preserve the history of changes made to the admission status of a student: check the improved Admission View Form and the new Admission Statuses History Form. You may now view all the former statuses with their effective date, rather than just the current status (just click on the purple current status of the student in the Admission View Form)
  • In accordance with our Customer Terms of Service, we have added a new Account page on the My Institution setup form to let you record the name, tel, email and postal address of both the Account Administrator and the Billing Contact referred to in section 2 of the Customer Terms of Service.
Miscellaneous

June 2018

Miscellaneous
  • Minor cosmetic changes
  • Documented the new Batch Import feature that was released on May 14th.
  • Published a new video tutorial to show how Batch Import works.

May 2018

Improvements

Deployed changes related to the new European data privacy law (GDPR)

  • A user can now access all the personal information stored about them by clicking their name on the upper left corner of the Home page.
  • We added a feature that enables us to post notices that certain users must consent to in order to use College Office. This is currently only used for European institutions.
  • Admission documents: you may now attach documents (or hyperlinks) to student admission records. You may give students permission to download some of those documents and/or to upload documents that get attached to their admission record. See the improved My Institution, Admission View Form, and Student Home Screen.
  • Class documents: instructors can now attach documents (or hyperlinks) to their classes and/or assignments for students to download. See the improved Class View Form and Assignment View Form.
  • Batch imports: you can import batches of records into College Office. See the new Import Templates screen in Setup and Batch Imports screen. Check the video tutorial that shows how Batch Import works.
  • You may now decide if instructors are allowed or not to modify assignment types for their classes (one global default setting that can be overridden for each instructor in a class). See the improved My Institution and Class Instructor Edit Form.
  • We have made it easier to delete classes: you no longer need to manually remove assignments and students before deleting a class.
  • College Office will no longer allow you to record an assignment grade which is greater than the maximum To value of any grade as defined in Grades
Changes To Reports

February 2018

Improvements
  • New tutorial videos for registrars accessible from the help system (the videos for instructors were released earlier.)
  • When matching an average to a letter grade, College Office used to round the average to the closest integer and then compare this value to the Lower and Upper integer values assigned to each grade (for example if a student got and average of 88.654 in a class, College Office would round this to 89 and match it to a B grade if the B grade had been defined with Lower = 80 and Upper = 90.) The new logic remains the same, except that the rounding is now done to 2 decimal points: 88.654 is rounded to 88.65 and is matched with a B if B has been defined with Lower = 80.00 and Upper = 89.99. See the improved Grades and Grade Edit forms.
  • The student average in a class based on the grades received for each assignment is now automatically computed as assignment grades are recorded or new assignments are created or modified.
  • The student average in a class is now more readily visible to students, instructors and registrars.
  • The Transactions pages of the Person View Form, Admission View Form and Term Enrollment View Form now display all the transactions of that person. This is a change from the previous behavior where the Transactions page of the Admission View Form only displayed the transactions linked to that admission record and the Transactions page of the Term Enrollment View Form only displayed the transactions linked to that student term enrollment record.
  • Students can now view all their financial records directly from the web portal without having to view them under a specific term (semester.)
  • New tutorial videos for instructors accessible from the help system
Changes to Reports
  • The Gradebook report can now be directly printed from the Class screen without having to navigate to the reports section of the application.
  • The Gradebook report has been improved to display the student averages in the class.
  • New report: Satisfactory Academic Progress (SAP) Report computes completion % for each student.
  • Improved Transactions Report so user can filter Payments by Payment Method and charges by Product or Product Type.

January 2018

Improvements
  • Users who have forgotten their username can now recover it via email.
  • The details of your College Office subscription (price & anniversary date) and all related charges and payments posted after 1/1/2018 are now visible from the the new Subscription page of the improved My Institution form.
Changes To Reports
  • New report: My Attendance Collection Form for instructors to print a class attendance collection form which students can sign,
  • New report: My Gradebook for instructors to print a cross-reference table of all students and all assignments with grades when applicable.
  • New report: Transactions Report to print a list of all financial transactions between 2 dates.
  • New report: My Financial Statement for students to print from the student access module.

December 2017

Improvements
  • Instructors can now click on a student in their class to view and record at once all attendance and assignments data for that student.
  • Audit students in a class (students which have been assigned a non-credit grade) are now excluded from the gradebook (they were already excluded from the attendance.)
  • You can assign at once the same grade to all the students of a class. Check the Students page of the improved Class View Form.
  • You can create a grade that can be marked as "Exclude from transcript". Student class records with such grade are excluded from the student transcript as well as from any GPA, Points and Credits computations. Check the improved Grade Edit Form.
  • Improved grade book module so that you can define assignment types which determine the way College Office computes student final grades. College Office can now compute the average of a student for all assignments of the same type within a given class, as well as compute the final student average in the class as a weighted average of the assignment type averages. Check the improved Class View Form, Assignment View Form, Assignment Edit Form and the new Assignment Types form. We have created 2 Assignment Types for your institution: Test and Homework, but you can add other ones as needed. Check the Gradebook and Assignment Types article in the knowledge base.
  • The improved Class Enrollment Edit Form now lets you see and grade all the assignments of a student in a class (previously you could see & grade all the students for an assignment, but not not all assignments for a student,) as well as see & record attendance of a student for all class sessions (previously you could see & record the attendance of all students in a class session, but not of all sessions for a student.)
  • Added Price History for Products and made a few other background changes as we prepare to release an improved billing module in the future. Check the improved Product Edit Form.
  • Navigation improvement: check the changes in the Classes page of the Admission View Form and of the Term Enrollment View Form. When clicking on a class there used to be a popup screen asking you to select between viewing the class information or editing the student class enrollment record, this has been replaced by a one click operation: click on the purple class name to view the class, click somewhere else in the tile to edit the student class enrollment record.
  • Navigation improvement: check the changes in the Students page of the Class View Form. When clicking on a student there used to be a popup screen asking you to select between viewing the student information or editing the student class enrollment record, this has been replaced by a one click operation: click on the purple student name to view the student information, click somewhere else in the tile to edit the student class enrollment record.
  • Minor navigation changes in the Setup form.
Changes To Reports
  • Modified Student Report Cards, Student Transcripts I, Student Transcripts II and Student Transcript - Compact so that they ignore student class records with a grade for which "Exclude From Transcript" is set to true.

November 2017

Changes To Reports
  • Modified Student Directory report: added Date Of Birth.

October 2017

Changes To Reports
  • Modified Last Presence Report report: added Admission Status and Term Status.
  • New Active Students for Billing report. This report lists the names of all students considered as active between 2 dates for billing purposes. Use this report to understand the bill you receive from us.
  • Modified Students Directory report to filter by credit or audit status of the students. You may now filter by students who take at least one class for credit, students who take at least one class for audit, or students who only take classes for audit.
  • Modified Term Academic Results report to show the grand total of credits tried, credits earned and financial aid credits.

September 2017

Improvements
  • Added a Financial Aid Credits field to the Courses (see the modified Course Edit Form).
  • Audit and Withdrawn students no longer show when taking attendance of a class session.
  • Added option to target email broadcasting by gender.
  • Greatly improved the email broadcasting feature: you can target recipients based on their term, class, program of study, graduation, status (admission status, term status, program status or class status) or membership in a list. Check the Messages help topic for more details. (Note: this feature is still in beta testing and will be released later to all institutions.)
  • Added a filter by Gender to the Students Directory report.
  • Replaced "Points Earned" by "Quality Points". Points Earned were computed only including earned credits (student has a passing grade) while Quality Points are computed including credits from failed classes. Quality Points can only differ from Points Earned if you have failing grades with a Grade Point Value greater than 0.
Changes To Reports
  • Modified Student Transcript II report to optionally show cumulative stats by term.
  • Modified the Term Academic Results report to include the total of Financial Aid Credits received by each student.
  • Modified the Student Transcript II report to optionally show Financial Aid Credits

August 2017

  • I added email broadcasting functionality: you can easily broadcast an email message to all students of a term (by the registrar) or all students of a class (by the registrar or the instructor.)
  • You can see all the students enrolled in a program from the Program View Form.
  • The instructor can now record all assignment grades at once. Check the improved Assignment View Form.
  • The Student Program Progress Report can now be printed either for a single student or for all the students of a term.

July 2017

  • Adding a holiday or changing the date(s) of a holiday will now cause College Office to delete all already existing class sessions which fall on this date or between these dates (student attendance records are automatically updated accordingly.) Previously, the holiday had to already exist before creating the class schedule and adding the holiday afterwards was of no effect.

June 2017

  • First release of this new help system.
  • Modified College Office so that it integrates with the new help system by providing context sensitive access to the help system (just click on any screen.)
  • Deployed the new grade book functionality which enables instructors to post assignments for their class, record assignment grades and, if they so choose, automatically compute the final grade from the weighted average of all assignments (check the Assignments page in the improved Class View Form)
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