Engineers have performed smoke tests

Maintenance closed

Code deployment has begun

The EQUAL Dev team are planning a release on the 11th January during the day. There is no expected downtime for this release.

If you've got any questions about the items in the release, please feel free to ask. Please feel free to share with any customers so they're aware of the upcoming changes.

New Features

Preventing auto enrolment before a project start date

The automatic enrolment on the TSN back-office application will now use the Project Start Date, preventing a learner from being enrolled onto a course if the project hasn't yet been started (for example, if we are assigning learners to the 24/25 academic year at the end of the 23/24 academic year).

SWANS Feedback Structure

Our feedback standard for tutors is to use the SWANS model, which provide a best practice approach to giving feedback to our learners. The SWANS model splits feedback into 4 distinct sections:

• Summative feedback
  • An overview of the feedback
• Key Strengths
  • The sections that the learner has done well on
• Key Areas of Development
  • Any sections that the learner should aim to improve on
• Next Steps
  • What the learner should look to do next

Currently, internal tutors have been using this feedback structure manually by adding the titles inside the existing feedback summary - this change formalises that structure inside EQUAL.

This should only affect learners on Main EQUAL, and existing feedback should remain in the existing format. If other tenancies would like to use this feedback structure, please contact the EQUAL Development Team.

Allow more tutors to be selected as personal tutor

When we initially deployed the Personal Tutor feature, we limited the list of tutors to those that could mark that specific course. This has now been expanded to allow any tutor that would be available on that site, regardless of whether they would mark the course or not.

Display created date for EQUAL tenancies

The EQUAL site page will now include the created date for each tenancy. We have backfilled this value for some tenancies from the auditlogs but some tenancies may not have a value available for us to pull - if you have the correct date for a tenancy and would like it to be set, please send a ticket to websupport@theskillsnetwork.com.

LSA Final Opportunity To Submit email

The LSA team have final opportunity email that they send to learners manually if they have not submitted for a long time after the deadline. This adds a field to EQUAL that track when this has been done and also updates the system to trigger sending that email using EQUAL's email system.

Add "Send on 2nd Piece" to Project Send To College Type

In EQUAL against a project there is a Send to College Type. Currently the only two options are on enrolment or on 1st piece of work. This adds an additional option to send on the second piece of work.

Add ability to deactivate a user across all tenancies

To aid in removing access to users who have since left the company, there is a new role called "Cross Site User Deactivation". Users with this role will be able to deactivate all user accounts across all sites.

This is available on the "Cross Site Learner Search" page and the User Account.

Add searchable drop downs to various pages

This is a minor quality of life improvement to the quality checks and learner's submission page, which allows you to search through the dropdowns instead of having to use a long dropdown list and find the item you need.

Bug Fixes

• Remove the inactive courses from the course assignment tool on the TSN backoffice site