Engineers are satisfied that there are no issues.

Maintenance closed

Code deployment has been completed

Engineers are monitoring for any issues

Code deployment in progress

The EQUAL Dev team are planning a release on the 1st May during the day. There may be a short period of downtime as part of the release - any user that receives an error should wait a few seconds before retrying their action.

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

Improving the experience of assigning assessors to external learners

Assigning assessors to external learners requires several additional steps, due to the fact that the learner is considered part of our partner's EQUAL tenancy instead of Main EQUAL (though they are still visible inside Main EQUAL). Currently, to handle allocation the admin would need to log into each tenancy one-by-one and assign the tutor and attempting to assign a tutor to a learner from inside Main EQUAL would display an error.

This release will update the assignment process to:

• Check if the learner is on Main EQUAL
  • If so, check if the assessor is eligible to mark on that course. If not, display an error
  • Otherwise, assign the assessor
• Otherwise
  • Check if the project allows Main EQUAL tutors.
    • If so, check if the assessor is eligible to mark on that course
    • If they are, then we assign the assessor. Otherwise we fall through to the bottom
  • Otherwise, search for an assessor with the same email address on that tenancy
  • If one exists and can mark the course, assign that assessor
  • Otherwise, display an error

The above should happen invisibly, and greatly improve the experience of assigning work to assessors from Main EQUAL and reduce the amount of time spent logging into other sites.

Add ability to projects to prevent notification emails

Traditionally the system has sent various "notification" emails to learners

• An email when the learner has submitted work
• An email when the learner has an overdue assessment
• An email when the learner has an upcoming assessment
• Two newsletter emails (though this has since been turned off for most learners)
• An email telling the learner that they have an upcoming apprenticeship visit

For some projects, these emails might not be appropriate (for example, learners are enrolled on some optional courses in a specific project).

This release adds the ability to disable each of those notifications. By default, all notifications will be enabled.

Tracking Bootcamps payment milestones

It will now be possible to track the various Bootcamps payment milestones inside the QA tab on EQUAL (with a bulk-set action also available).

We appreciate that there may be many bootcamps learners that haven't had this value set - please submit a ticket via email to websupport@theskillsnetwork.com if you'd like us to backfill a large number of learners.

Ability to add the Unique Learner Number to an enrolment

There will now be a field on EQUAL to track a learner's Unique Learner Number (which is taken from the LRS and is used to track what courses a learner has already undertaken, and is used for various other fields by the IST team). A future update will look at populating this value automatically in EQUAL from the TSN Website's LRS integration.

If a backfill is necessary, please again submit a ticket to websupport@theskillsnetwork.com.

Upcoming releases

In early May, we will be making some updates to both our TQUK integration and some of the deployment processes that we use for EQUAL.

TQUK Integration

We have been informed that there are plans for the TQUK Integration to have additional functionality which will allow us to send updates to their system after our initial registration. In advance of that feature landing, we have taken the opportunity to perform some maintenance and clean-up of EQUAL's implementation which:

• Improves Engineering's visibility of the TQUK process, including potential failures
• Reduces the amount of work required to implement changes and new features
• Improves the confidence of making changes to the system

However, due to the nature of the TQUK process we're unable to perform full and rigorous testing of our changes. To maintain system stability and allow us to confirm that the upgrade has been successful, we will be doing a specific TQUK release which will just contain this feature - if there are issues it will allow us to revert quickly and safely.

We expect to perform this release as a zero-downtime release on the 7th May, though this date is to be confirmed.

Deployment process update

Our future plans for EQUAL involve a complex infrastructure update to how EQUAL is hosted, which we expect to provide a lot of flexibility in performance and reliability of the platform. However, due to the age of the EQUAL platform, several behind the scenes changes are needed to be made. The initial update will improve the deployment process which will:

• Reduce the barriers to these other infrastructure changes
• Improve our ability to revert back to an earlier release in case of a failed deployment

We have been trialling these updates as part of our User Acceptance Testing process for multiple months, but there is still some risk in this update. Similar to the TQUK, we will be performing this upgrade as a separate release to allow us an easy ability to revert to the previous process.

This release will require downtime, so will be done out of hours at 10pm on the 15th May.