Populi Blog

Populi Turns 5

May 20th, 2013

Five years ago today the first user logged in to Populi. Here are some “since-then” stats to mark the occasion.

52,000 users have logged in over 7.5 million times
2.8 million student enrollments in over 500,000 courses
2.7 million questions answered on 53,000 tests
387,000 comments on 83,000 discussions
2.9 million grades on 383,000 assignments
47,000 degrees granted
193,000 to-dos completed
400,000 files uploaded
478,000 library resources
128,000 bookstore orders

Thanks to all of you for an awesome first five years. Let’s see what we can accomplish in the next five!

Live chat: now in all your Populi courses

May 14th, 2013

Plus, full LTI capability and other improvements

New in Populi courses: live chat! Now your instructors and students can converse in real-time right in any Populi course. Chats let you embed images (even from Instagram), videos from YouTube and Vimeo, documents from Scribd, and even use emoji characters. They’re easy to set up: just schedule one and everyone in the class—students, auditors, profs, teaching assistants—can join the conversation.

To use chat, the course instructor just needs to click Chat and start a new chat session. There’s nothing to set up or figure out—it’s live and ready to go in every Populi course.

Populi now has full LTI capability

A few months ago we added some basic LTI functionality, letting you link Populi courses to Moodle (or any other LTI-capable LMS). We beefed this feature up in two key areas:

The LTI connection now lets the external LMS pass grades back through to Populi’s gradebook
Faculty no longer need to remember the consumer key and shared secret to link to the external LMS

Read more about it in our Knowledge Base.

Here’s some other stuff we released recently:

The Data Slicer has a few new reporting options:

You can now get data for Cumulative Credits across All Terms (which lets you get data out of Populi that was previously tedious to retrieve)
We also added Unknown and Blank to the Exit Reason options in the Data Slicer, as well as a new condition called Student Role Status, which has options for Active and Inactive

The Degree Audit now shows incomplete courses in the “not completed” view.

Course evaluations have a new faculty visibility option: Available after 60% completion and course is finalized.

You can now create custom course Delivery Methods in Academic Settings. We also let you use Delivery Method as a fee rule. And, you can now include Delivery Method in the XLS export of the Courses Table.

Custom transcripts can now include course comments and progam-based honors (contact support if you’d like us to update your transcript template).

Weekly release notes

May 6th, 2013

A story about breaking a habit

We recently began publishing weekly release notes in our Knowledge Base. Each week we post a list of Features & Improvements and Bugfixes that have gone live on our customers’ sites. The list will capture everything we release, from the big to the small, from the really cool to the kinda mundane, from the hotshot new feature to the fix for that dumb ol’ bug.

We haven’t been very consistent with release notes over the past year. If you checked the dates, you’d be forgiven if you thought we hadn’t done anything to Populi between March 2012 and April 2013. Of course, that’s not the case. We’ve been very busy (and we remain so). But we’ve let detailed release notes fall by the wayside.

That happened because we changed how we develop and release new stuff. We used to save up a pile of things and dump them out onto Populi’s servers during the wee hours of the night, all at once. This lent itself well to big blog posts and release announcements in the Knowledge Base. But now we develop, test, and release features and fixes individually*—it’s a much better system that lets us be more agile and responsive in our development and support. But, it doesn’t lend itself to the big announcement too well—after all, who wants a million posts about individual bugfixes?

For whatever reason, that notion of the Big Announcement stood in the way of actual communication for about a year. Something dumb like that shouldn’t get in the way of getting the work done, but that’s what it did. One day early in April, however, I (the writer) had a DUH moment: the Big Announcement isn’t the only way to communicate about releases. So I started compiling the week’s releases in a digest post in the Knowledge Base. No need for a big to-do: all our customers need is a regular update about what’s new and what’s been fixed. Small, quick posts: problem solved.

The takeaway from all this relates to something we wrote awhile back…

…software (like any tool) creates habits in its users—especially software that makes you do too much work. These “habits” aren’t limited to individual users, either: sometimes, entire schools shape policies and institutional workflows around the limits of what their old system could do.

Populi sometimes disrupts how a school runs itself because schools have adapted to their old software. And, it turns out, we did things a certain way because of how our old software “trained” us to inform customers about new releases. But our new development protocol obviated the need for the old “big-announcement” strategy. It was a minor disruption, but one that nonetheless affected our transparency and communication as a company.

And as it happens, the solution was incredibly simple: stop thinking in the old ruts.

* Do you like technical explanations? Here’s what we used to do, and here’s what we do now…

Get to know us! Here’s James Hill…

April 26th, 2013

A few Novembers ago, the UPS guy started showing up at our door with some odd packages. Torch fuel cylinders. A vacuum machine. Heavy, elbow-length gloves. Desk-mounted tweezers.

Little chunks of gold.

See, Christmas was just around the corner, and James Hill had decided to learn cast jewelry making so as to surprise his wife with some earrings and a necklace. The office meeting table was his studio, and after a few weeks we grew accustomed to the tasks of his craft: melting gold with a torch, sucking air bubbles from a mold with the vacuum machine, filing and polishing his casts, soldering things… When all was said and done, Mrs. Ruth Hill did indeed have a merry Christmas, and James, Populi’s polymath Chief Technical Officer, had acquired another esoteric skill.

As CTO, James is the guy who imagines Populi’s innards—everything from the programming languages to the database structure to the server configurations to the relationships among different parts—and then brings it all into being, whether by corralling Populi’s development team or through the sweat of his own brow. His raison d’être here at Populi is to use computer programs to wrangle new computer programs into being, a job that requires he mix abstract conceptualizing with a comprehensive technical knowledge of his tools and infrastructure. He knows a lot about computers.

“Computers suck,” said James. “They’re overrated.”

James grew up in the scrubby plains near Hutto, Texas. He occupied his childhood reading books atop hay bales, extracting recalcitrant goats from wire fences, and, in a murky brown catfish pond, learning to scuba dive. One time he was in a pickup truck with his father that broke down on a railroad crossing. To the east, a freight train was bearing down on them. To the west, a tornado had just touched the ground. DID THEY SURVIVE? Find out in the next paragraph!

Yes, they did survive. The train stopped for the tornado, and the tornado went elsewhere. You’d forgive James if he’d just took to sucking his thumb after that, but instead he took an interest in electricity and computers. An early success: using two stainless steel mixing bowls, he built a van de Graff generator. An old computer monitor prompted more ambitious experiments that culminated one afternoon in—according to his mother Becky—”a tremendous boom” inside the house. Terrified, Becky ran upstairs and “found him holding a couple of wires from the computer a few inches apart, with a blue arc buzzing across the gap. All he said was, ‘Look at this, Mom!’” To create the arc, James had wired the machine to a metal doorsill and then plugged it into the wall. The resulting surge clapped through the house, frying two other computers and temporarily stunning the TV and a toaster.

A former Microsoft VP steered the precocious high-schooler towards a lower-voltage facet of computing: programming. James took right to it, eventually landing a summer job with Dell. The corporate culture put a sour taste in his mouth, and James spent the next few years alternating between computers and other exploits. He spent one summer chainsawing mesquite trees in hundred-degree heat. He commenced a Computer Science major at Harding College in Arkansas. Next, something completely different: James decamped to Moscow, Idaho to start a liberal arts degree at New Saint Andrews College. During his studies, the NSA brass discerned his way with software, and on more than one occasion asked him to sort out problems with their old, creaky SIS. For the most part, though, he did all he could to ignore computers, instead earning his keep as a barista.

But as he neared graduation, James suddenly found his attention directed at a girl named Ruth. Tapping on a calculator one afternoon, he realized that slinging lattés wouldn’t do if she said yes to the question he wanted to ask her. Cracking his knuckles, he took a job at EMSI‘s development department. His work on their databases, and then on their customer software, eventually earned him a fancy VP of Development job title. One day while talking with Adam Sentz about NSA’s old, creaky SIS, James realized that the two of them could replace the old system with “something better than that in about two weeks.” And the rest is history…

With Populi, James has been able to develop not just college software, but also a company and culture. “This place is the antithesis of a large corporation. Instead of being a disposable cog in a very large machine, everything you do affects the company for good or ill. And it makes no pretenses of being an all-consuming thing—we all have a lot of time for our families and other, more interesting things.” Like jewelry casting, or another recent discovery, cheesemaking. Most interesting to James is Ruth, who, having answered “Yes” to that question he asked her, now tends to their five young children—one of whom, it must be reported, once whipped a belt around a ceiling fan, swinging from an ottoman to the sofa like he was Indiana Jones. Someone get that kid a couple of mixing bowls.

“Lemme put it this way,” said James, “I have a love-hate relationship with computers. I get a great sense of satisfaction from writing clean code. But the abstraction and transience of everything I do is frustrating. Software behaves somewhat like a living organism that you have to keep alive and constantly improve. Yesterday’s clean code is tomorrow’s outdated problem. Imagine having a child who never laughs at you or isn’t cute, but who still fills his diaper all the time. That’s what software is like.”

Feature Spotlight: Course cloning and syncing

April 23rd, 2013

Courses contain a lot of content. Links, files, reading lists, assignments, tests, lessons, and so on… and to make your courses as useful to your students as possible, it’s good to throw it all in there.

But what if you have four sections of Business 201 to run, and the course is the same this year as it was last year? How are you gonna get all that content into this year’s courses? Are you gonna go download all of that stuff and then re-upload it into each section? Sounds like fun!

That’s why Populi courses have had cloning and syncing from the get-go. Cloning lets you import content from one term’s course to another’s. Syncing lets you share content among sections of the same course in the same term. They save you a ton of work: no re-uploading, no tiresome double-checking, no Did-I-remember-everything? night terrors. These features let you share the items you’d otherwise spend the most time creating: assignments (and groups), faculty-created discussions, files, lessons, links, books, supplies, and tests.

Cloning

There are a few ways to clone course content:

When an Academic Admin is adding courses to a term, they have the option to Import Courses from any other term:

When doing so, they can simply import the courses, or also clone the course data (that is, the content)—as you might guess, this gets a lot of work done in just one step:

Course instructors can also use the clone feature once they’re assigned to teach the course. In the course’s Info tab, just click the gear, select the items to be cloned, and go for it:

Academic Admins have an additional option here: they can clone content over from different catalog courses. If you need materials cloned from, say, MGMT201 into BUS201, just ask an Academic Admin user to do so.

Sync

If you have multiple sections of a course, you can sync them. Syncing not only lets you share content among course sections—it also automatically updates all sections if you make a change in any of the sections.

It’s simple: in each section’s Info tab, just check “yes” for sync.

After syncing sections, you can also un-sync them (just un-check “Sync”) and then modify the content for each section. The synced content won’t go away, and now you can edit it without affecting the other sections.

Cute animals sell software

April 17th, 2013

Webpop, a cloud-based content management system and code editor that lets you build websites, recently ran an experiment on the signup link for their 30-day free trial:

A while ago we launched an interesting little test to dig into the effect of emotional engagement. In this case we decided to test the click through rate on our call to action at the bottom of most of our pages where we urge people to give our 30 day free trial a shot.

They put up a picture of a black lab puppy gazing at the signup button; next, they compared the click-rate between the puppy-version and the text-only version. The results were startling:

It turns out, the puppy version had more than double the number of clicks on the signup button than the text only version, with a statistical certainty of more than 99.9% of this being more than just random coincidence.

Double the clicks! That’s, frankly, amazing. Seeing that we were probably leaving money on the table, we cast aside our convictions about straightforward marketing and inaugurated an experiment of our own:

Introducing: the Signup Piglet

Not having any puppies around the office, we decided to make use of our ready access to piglets (not that we have piglets running around the office… though, a man can dream, can’t he?). So, here she is—the Signup Piglet! Click anywhere on this little straw-covered cutie to go to our signup form, where you can contact us about a demo or subscribe to our newsletter.

We look forward to hearing from you!

Life lessons: the steer

April 15th, 2013

Our company’s culture and understanding of itself isn’t just determined by what we do within office walls. Sometimes something outside the office proves a perfect metaphor for something within the company or our industry.

For instance, Toby Robinson just bought a yearling Angus steer to put on his three acres of grass just outside of town. One morning, he dropped a note on our group chat:

By 10:10 AM, Isaac, Brendan, and Mark had joined Toby, fanning out into the hayfields and tree farms surrounding Toby’s place in search of the steer. A mud swath surrounded the adjoining hayfield, some 80 acres of steep Palouse hillside green with the new growth of Spring. Surely the steer had traversed this swath, leaving hoofprints, and had paused somewhere in the rolling green to snack on the tender young grass. Populi is a company of experienced hunters and animal husbandmen; we’d track down this errant animal in no time.

But after circumnavigating hundreds of acres that morning, we found nothing save for a fresh splatter of dung in a field. This 600-pound, sternum-height Angus steer had disappeared without a trace. No hoofprints in the mud. No lowing off in the trees. No torn turf where he’d paused for a bite to eat. Nothing. We reconvened at Toby’s house and shook our heads; our hapless QA guy called Animal Control and called his neighbors to advise them of the loose black steer. Our best guess was that he’d beelined south, back in the direction of the ranch from which Toby had bought him a few days before.

That evening we all received a text from Mark Ackerman:

Mark lives on the ridge up above Toby. Speaking with a neighbor after work he mentioned the steer and asked if she’d seen anything.

“No,” she said, “but someone called me earlier to ask if I’d lost a calf…”

The steer had wandered south and then west, traveling up and down the Palouse slopes and the fingers of the forested ridge before wandering onto a small farm some four miles away. Our entire search in the hayfields was focused in the wrong area; our notions of him beelining south were belied by his true course: due west. In short order the steer was returned to Toby’s pasture, and all was right on the farm.

This episode really reminded us of some of the bugs we’ve had to fix.

Most bugs are easy to find. “These credits aren’t adding up correctly.” “Oh, sorry about that, there was a bug in the calculation. Fixed it!” Others, however, ain’t. Permitting me to quote myself, here’s what’s involved sometimes:

One of our programmers—usually Patrick—simply reads through the code, line-by-line, to find what’s wrong. A few things to keep in mind about this job:

Computers and software are very literal; they require extremely precise instructions in order to work.

Bugs take several forms. The code might have a syntax problem, or is missing a statement, or has a slash where it should have a bracket (among a zillion other things).

Indeed, bugs are usually miniscule, but a tiny error is all it takes to transform a precise instruction into nonsense.***

Every part of Populi talks to other parts of Populi. And even those functions that aren’t directly connected are linked together like that Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon**** game from the late ’90′s. A bug in one place can affect a dozen other functions that rely on the broken function to do their own jobs.

Populi has about 361,000 lines of code.

Of course, knowing the nature of the problem narrows the needle-in-a-haystack odds in the bug hunt. For instance, if someone’s having trouble in Admissions, we know not to look at the Library codebase. Of course, given Populi’s intra-connectivity, sometimes we do need to look afield for the bug; a problem with Student Billing might trace back to an error in course enrollment, for example.

It’s those last ones—those bugs in course enrollment that cause unexpected things to happen in Student Billing—that make us feel like we’re tracking a steer through the Palouse hills. And sometimes it takes a chance mention from another user reporting a weird thing on, say, a transcript for us to figure out that the Billing bug actually stems from Academics.

Sometimes we think the bug is off to the south somewhere, when in fact it’s due west.

Enhanced Library search

April 4th, 2013

Plus other things we’ve let loose in the past several weeks…

We just released a pretty smart update to Library that includes much-improved search capabilities. The new search…

Includes a number of new operators that let you get more specific with your search
Accepts “fuzzier” inputs—that is, it’s more tolerant of misspellings; typing “Shakspeer” will now net you that copy of Hamlet you’ve been looking for…
Lets you search for exact matches for title, author, and subject

You can also now import and export MARC records right within Populi! Browse Resources and Resource Batches let you export MaRC records of your resources, and Add Resources gives you the option of importing a MaRC file to create new resources.

And in case you missed it, about a month ago we also released spine and barcode labels for library resources. Read about them in the Knowledge Base.

A minor refinement of user roles

The Bookstore and Library Staff roles are no longer tied to the Staff role.

When we initially created these user roles, we tied them to Staff so they would be able to access certain personal details for Bookstore customers and Library Patrons. But this arrangement proved a little too liberal—for instance, many Library Staff are student workers for whom Staff access isn’t exactly appropriate. So, we de-coupled those roles from the Staff role. If you believe this change may affect your Library and Bookstore users, please see this article.

Additionally…

The Data Slicer now lets you:

Add communication plans en masse
Retrieve advisor information for students
Add any tag as a data column
Retrive anticipated completion dates for students’ degrees

The Enrollment XLS report now lets you include additional columns.

Speaking of additional columns, we added several Prospect info fields to the “export helper”—you can now include them as additional columns when you export, say, the Students Table.

We added some new print options to course evaluation reports.

You can now print transcripts in bulk from the Academic Term > Students Table tab; there’s also a new getTranscript call in the API.

There’s a new specialization type for degrees: Concentration.

We now warn you about ungraded assignments when you’re finalizing a course:

And pop-up notifications now stay onscreen for ten seconds (up from three).

All this, together with numerous bugfixes, performance tweaks, and minor interface items.

Legal language

February 18th, 2013

We recently announced some upcoming updates to our various legal documents. All in all, the revamped documents are a good step forward for us and our customers: they’re better organized and do a better job of defining some key terms and relationships.

But one thing we’re not crazy about with the new documents—or our outgoing Terms, for that matter—is the general tone of the language. Legal language, in its quest for absolute clarity, is wont to produce real mouthfuls. Dig this one from Section 4 of our Acceptable Use Policy:

“You hereby grant to Populi a non-exclusive, transferable, sublicenseable, worldwide, royalty-free license to use, copy, modify, create derivative works based upon, distribute, publicly display, publicly perform and distribute your User Content in connection with operating and providing the Services and Content to you and to the Customer where you are or were employed, engaged, enrolled, or applying to be enrolled.”

I don’t know about you, but my eyes start glazing over about six letters into the word “sublicenseable”—and I’m the guy they pay to read and (re)write stuff like this! But that’s the thing about legal language: it has to cover every possible situation. Without the above, a student could sue us for saving his course discussion comment so his professor could read it later. If that happened often enough, we’d have to just fold this thing up and go home.

So, the legal language is there to help us color inside the lines, and it’s there so you know exactly what the arrangement is. As the old saw goes, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

But… yeah, this stuff, frankly, is a solemn read, and its detail and precision can get in the way of you understanding what we’re trying to say. For that reason, we’ve included brief, plain-English summaries above each main section of the official documents.

Each section is prefaced by a “This means that…” blurb that elucidates the official text that follows. These aren’t legally-binding clauses of the policies; if you can think of the policies as fences, then think of these summaries as notes tied to the gateposts saying, “This fence means that that there is yours, and this over here is ours.”

For example, the summary of Section 4 of the AUP distills the above-quoted mouthful into this crisp little sentence: ”We make no claims of any kind to your Content, but you give us the right to make that Content useful to you and others at your school.” Much better, right?

We got this idea from some other web-based services, including 500px and Shopify. Evernote took a different approach but in the same spirit: it rewrote its Terms as a Q&A in plain-ish language. It’s a good notion. Legal language can be dense and intimidating, and while there’s some justification for it to be so, we nevertheless wanted to help de-mystify it a bit for our users.

Upcoming changes to our Terms of Service

February 15th, 2013

We’ll be making some changes to our Terms of Service and Privacy Policy soon, and in the interest of forthrightness and transparency, we wanted to let you know about them ahead of time. You can find them on this preview of our new legal page, where we will soon collect all four of our various official documents. Those documents include the Customer Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy, Privacy Policy, and Copyright Policy. The new Terms and Policies will go into effect on April 1, 2013 (and, noooo, this isn’t a prank…).

Before we get into the changes, we want to emphasize a couple fundamentals that are not changing—things that are basic to how we do business and serve our customers:

1. Your data is yours

And it always will be. Our business is simply to provide you with a tool to collect, store, manage, and use your information for the benefit of your school, staff, faculty, and students. And should you choose to move on to a different system, we give you the tools to easily take all your data with you. We won’t sell or otherwise traffic your information—our mission is to give you a safe, secure way to take care of it yourselves.

2. Pricing works the same way

We’re not doing anything new or different here. You’ll still pay a monthly base rate and per-student price, together with any extra file storage and SMS fees. These are all still plainly spelled out on our completely public pricing page. If we need to raise prices, we’ll still give you 90 days’ notice (we reserve the right to keep price drops a surprise!). And implementation, support, updates, etc., are all still included for free.

Okay. So what’s new?

Well, for one, all the wording is gonna be different. For the most part, though, it’s just a more precise way of saying the same things we were saying before.

That said, our current (soon-to-be-old) TOS had a few gray areas that we wanted to clarify:

Customers and users

First, we wanted to better distinguish between our customers and our users. Customers are the schools that do business with us (i.e., that send us payment every month). Users are the individuals authorized by those schools to make use of Populi—whether staff, faculty, students, or prospects.

Accordingly, we have now divided the Terms into two chief sections: the Customer Terms of Service (CTOS), and the Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). The CTOS defines the business relationship—what we provide with our service, the customer’s responsibilities for use and payment, how to set up an account and terminate use, and so on. The AUP defines the rights and responsibilities of users in relation to Populi—rights to content and data, restrictions on use (no hacking or illegal stuff), general responsibilities, and dispute resolution.

Pricing and payment

The only novel element in our new Pricing and Payment section is a change in nomenclature: we’re replacing “active student” with “billable student”. The problem we would run into is that “active” has a few potential meanings. It could mean “a person with an active Student role” or “a Student who is an active user“. Because our services’ definition of “active” is somewhat different from that of our Terms, our customers sometimes assumed the wrong meaning.

So, for clarity’s sake, we felt that the students we actually charge you for deserved a unique term, one that isn’t used anywhere else in Populi: they are now called billable students. Everything else, however, remains the same: billable students are students enrolled in or auditing one or more courses for seven or more calendar days in a given month. Nothing sneaky, no sleight of hand here: we’re just changing a word so everyone understands our pricing better.

User-generated content and data

As Populi has developed since the adoption of our Terms of Service some years back, user-generated content has assumed an even greater role than it has before. And given the swirl of concerns regarding copyrights, distribution, piracy, privacy, and so on, we needed to make sure we A) did a better job of defining user content, B) clarified your ownership and rights over it, and C) sought all the proper releases from you to make it available to you via our service. Again, nothing substantial is changing here: you can still use Populi to store, manage, and distribute (within the rights granted to you by any copyright holders) data, files, audio, video, documents, etc.—but now the legal fencing around this part of the service has received a fresh coat of paint and new hinges on the gates.

Dispute resolution

Our outgoing TOS implicitly assumed that any disputes between us and a user or customer would be handled via civil litigation. But the thing about litigation is that it’s a very public, time-consuming, and expensive process that can prove incredibly destructive to entities with limited resources—not just us, but also our customers. Our incoming AUP specifies that disputes that come to that point will be handled in arbitration, which is private, less expensive, and swifter than dragging things into the courts. Of course, we hope it never gets to that point with any of our users or customers! But should things go south, we feel this is the best way to enter into a formal dispute both for you and for us.

Revamped Privacy Policy

We also refreshed our Privacy Policy. Just as with our TOS, nothing substantive changed:

Your data is still yours
We still take every reasonable measure to protect it and back it up (unfortunately, we cannot guarantee the absolute security of any information)
You can volunteer personal information confident that we will never sell it or otherwise share it
For purposes of customer service, system maintenance, diagnostics, usage patterns, and marketing (i.e. taglines like Now serving over 20,000 students!) we may use non-identifying aspects of your information in aggregate form
We share some information with third-parties so they can perform services on our behalf (such as credit card processing)

It’s pretty standard stuff, really, but now it’s better-organized and explains our policy with greater clarity than before.

The heart of the matter

Think of this as an overhaul of the user interface of the TOS. Yes, some things have moved, some things look totally new, but the substance is the same.

Again, the new policies are slated to go in effect as of April 1, 2013. Before that time, we may make minor tweaks to some of the wording, but we don’t anticipate anything major.

And, of course, we welcome your questions and comments.