The EQUAL Dev team are planning a release on the 28th March at 10pm. Downtime notices will be added to the site on the 24th March.

If you've got any questions about the items in the release, please feel free to ask.

Upcoming change

In an upcoming release (shortly after this one) we will be performing a security update to the way our passwords are stored, following the latest advice for securely storing and verifying passwords.

In the background, the system will upgrade the way passwords will be stored:

• Any new user accounts that are created will use this new password storage process
• Whenever a user logs in or changes their password, the password will be updated to use the new password storage process

This process will take place over several stages over several days (due to the amount of user accounts available in the system):

1. Changes will be deployed, which will update passwords on logging in. The Development Team will monitor for any issues with logging in.
2. When confirmed that there are no issues, a script will be run in the background to securely update passwords so that they use the new storage algorithm as a defence against learners who don't log in regularly (because their course has been completed etc). The Development Team will again monitor any issues.

As a general reminder of password security:

• Do not use the same password across multiple sites
• The longer your password is, the harder it is for an attacker to bruteforce. The longer, the better
• Adding numbers and special characters also increases the difficulty

We recommend using a password manager to both generate and store long passwords securely (for example: BitWarden, 1Password).

New Features

Overhaul of the learner contact area

A large amount of improvements have been made to the learner contact area:

• It is now possible to capture multiple contact reasons for a contact record, instead of it being forced to be a single contact reason
• Changes the contact methods list (Individual / Bulk options for Text and Email, Live chat and Internal - No Contact). Previous values will be kept.
• Adds the ability for a contact record to be marked as inbound/outbound
• Adds the ability to set an outcome for the contact record
• Adds the ability to say that a given contact record is related to a certain submission

Adds ability for a "Team" to be set on a user record

A free-text field has been added to the users page to mark which team a user is a part of. This is also then copied across to the new learner contact area.

Retention Team module

It is now possible to pass learners to the Retention Team. This process works similar to the On Hold functionality, with it being possible to mark the learner as with the retention team (and specifying which retention advisor has been assigned to this learner).

This will also allow you to add contact records on this page to chase the learner, which will automatically be copied to the main Contact Record.

Two Factor Authentication

It is now possible to secure your user account using Two Factor
Authentication. On your user details page, a QR code will be available to be scanned by your authentication app (for example, Google
Authenticator, Authy or Microsoft Authenticator) Learners may also enable this on their account. following similar steps.

When enabled, after logging on with your password you will be asked to verify your access with the code from your authenticator app.

For this initial soft-launch, 2FA will not be an enforced requirement of each user account, though this may change in the future.

Report Builder Changes

The Last Date of Learning is now added to the list of fields that can be selected in the Report Builder

Content Prompt Component

Currently, only questions can have a prompt if a learner does not fill in a value for that component. This has been changed so that there is a separate "Content Prompt" component, and adds it to more component types:

• MCQ components
• Tap & tap
• True/False
• Unjumble
• Wordsearch/Crosswords
• Correct/Incorrect words
• Image labeling
• Image pairing
• Dropdown

Bug Fixes

• Currently, learners who are part of a Bootcamp cohort don't include their contact times on EQUAL as part of that enrolment. This has been corrected.
• Previously, it was possible to include a capital letter in an email address that was used to log into EQUAL. This has been corrected to always lowercase the email address