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2024-10-24
New feature
User Tags
We're excited to announce the release of User Tags, a powerful new feature designed to enhance user management and organisation.

What’s New

Custom Tags: Create and assign tags to users, enabling flexible categorisation based on various criteria such as roles, interests, course progress, or engagement levels.

Enhanced Filtering: Easily filter users by tags, making it simpler to manage enrolments, send targeted communications, and generate reports for specific user groups.

Centralised Management: Use the new Tags tab in the Xen Admin Panel to view, edit, and manage all tags and their associated users, providing a streamlined platform for user segmentation.

Use Cases & Benefits

Organise Users by Role: Tag users based on their roles (e.g., learners, instructors, parents), making it easier to handle enrolments, permissions, and communication tailored to each group.

Targeted Messaging: Use tags to send specific messages to groups of users, such as reminders for learners tagged as "Inactive" or updates for users tagged as "Mentors."

Course-Specific Segmentation: Tags can help segment users based on their progress, enabling bulk actions like enrolling or re-enrolling users in supplementary courses based on their completion status.

Event and Campaign Management: Use tags to categorise users who attended events, registered for workshops, or participated in special campaigns, allowing for more personalised follow-ups and engagement.

Improved Reporting: Tags make it easier to generate reports for specific user groups, helping admins track performance, engagement, or other metrics related to tagged users.
2024-10-23
Timed Exams
Timed Exams
We’re excited to announce the release of Timed Exams, designed to enhance assessment capabilities by adding time constraints to exams.

Timed Exams create a more realistic testing environment, helping learners build time management skills and preparing them for high-stakes, time-constrained assessments in real-world scenarios. This feature also ensures fairness by standardising test durations.

What’s New
  • Time-Limited Assessments: Set specific time limits for exams, allowing you to simulate real-world testing conditions and ensure fair assessment.

  • Automatic Submission: Exams are automatically submitted when the time expires, ensuring consistency and fairness for all learners, but Learners can also opt to submit early.

  • Flexible Configuration: Admins can set custom durations for each exam based on requirements.
This feature is now available across all Xen tenancies.

To learn more, visit: https://help.xen.education/docs/en/87108065-timed-exams
2024-10-17
New feature
Course Bundles

We’re excited to introduce Courses Bundles, designed to streamline course management and enhance your learner experience.

What’s New?

Easier Course Management: Staff users can now group several courses together as a "Bundle," allowing them to manage multiple courses as a single entity while maintaining the integrity of the underlying courses' content.

Improved Learner Experience: Learners will see bundles as folders in their dashboard, reducing clutter and simplifying navigation.

Quick Enrolment & Activation: Bundling courses saves time when enrolling learners, scheduling content, or enabling multiple courses simultaneously.

Bundles can be created and managed from the Courses tab within the Xen Admin Panel.

This feature is now live for all new Xen tenancies and can be added to most existing tenancies upon request to your friendly Customer Success team.

Student dashboard

Student dashboard > Bundle view

Courses tab with Bundles
2024-10-08
New feature
Reporting of Hosted Videos storage and playback
We are pleased to announce an update to the Hosted Video services. 

If this option is active in your subscription, you can now see the usage of your storage and playbacks against your monthly quota in real-time when uploading or selecting a video.

This update brings transparency to both your storage and playback usage, providing better control and planning of your Hosted Video resources.

You can now see:
  1. Current Storage vs. Quota: Displays the amount of storage used (in minutes) compared to your monthly quota.
  2. Current Playback vs. Quota: Shows the total playback time (in minutes) compared to your monthly quota.

Capacity Indicators

Available Capacity is displayed as a percentage and the number of minutes remaining for both storage and playback.
Colour-Coded Alerts help you track your usage at a glance:
  • Up to 49% used: Green (Safe)
  • 50% to 74% used: Orange (Warning)
  • 75% to 99% used: Red (Critical Warning)
  • 100% used: Uploads are disabled when storage or playback reaches full capacity.

Example

If your Tenancy has the default 1,000 minutes of storage and 1,000 minutes of playback per month, you can now track usage in real-time to ensure you remain within your limits.



2024-04-26
Improvements
Learners Progress Metrics
We are pleased to announce the release of a significant improvements to your Xen Administration Panel, providing your staff with more information about users and courses/spaces and reporting metrics about your learners.

Update #1 - Admin > Users: Number of courses

The Users list now sports a new column called Courses showing how many courses each user is enrolled in.

Update #2 - Admin > User > Enrolments: Progress metrics

When selecting any user, staff member can now see 3 new columns for each of the course listed, from the Enrolments tab:
  1. Progress: The Completion to date, expressed as a percentage
  2. Grade Point Average: A calculation of the average weighted grade or result across all completed lessons so far and compared to the grade required to pass the course. This show 0% if there is no graded policy and graded content in the course.
  3. Engaged: The cumulated interactions recorded for the learner. expressed in hours.

Update #3 - Admin > Spaces & Courses: Number of enrolments

The Spaces & Courses list now sports a new column called Enrolments showing the total of users enrolled.

In addition, an "eye" icon has been added, to allow opening the details of the selected course in a new screen.

Update #4 - Admin > Spaces & Courses > Details: Progress metrics

When selecting any space or course, staff member can now see the same 3 new columns for each of the Learners listed:
  1. Progress
  2. Grade Point Average.
  3. Engaged
We hope this update is useful and we look forward to your feedback.
2023-09-21
Improvements
Upgrade to the HTML Editors
The Xen Authoring Tool provides multiple content editors, each focusing on a different approach and experience, with increasing levels of complexity.

3 main editors allow you to build content in radically different ways:
  1. "Simple" (formerly known as "Visual") is a simple text editor, allowing quick text-focused entries and basic layout capabilities in a single column.
     
    It is the default editor when inserting a text component in your page.

  2. "Advanced" (formerly known as "Loree") is a drag & drop layout HTML editor, allowing you to speed up the creation of dynamic templates .

    Standard WYSIWYG editors are good for text editing but inappropriate for creating HTML structures. The Advanced editor was created to allow you to create responsive grids of content, insert read-made blocks of content, save parts as mini-templates, and adjust your layout to different responsive breakpoints.
     
    You can select this editor instead of the default "Simple" one by editing the Settings of any text component.

  3. "Code" (formerly known as "Raw") is a HTML code editor, allowing you to insert custom code in your courses and pages. It supports HTML, CSS, and Javascript, allowing you to insert complex content, iframes, and anything HTML code can power.
     
    You can insert the "RAW" editor directly as a component in your pages, as well as by editing the settings of any existing text block to use it in lieu of another editor.

What has changed?

Since its initial development on the Xen platform, the "Loree" editor has taken a life of its own and quickly became a favourite amongst the Instructure Canvas community. 
Loree is a now separate product from our company, and has evolved substantially as a stand-alone offering since its introduction.

To prevent any confusion between the Xen version and its Canvas counterpart, we have taken the following steps:


New Naming Conventions

  1. The "Visual" editor was renamed "Simple" editor, reflecting its barebone approach to text editing, and the set of features it offers.

  2. The "Loree" editor was renamed "Advanced" editor, thus distancing from the actual Loree product.
    The new name reflects the increase in features and capabilities of this editor compared to the "Simple" one.

  3. The "Raw" editor was renamed "Code" editor, to better identify its purpose.
2022-09-30
Improvements
New Authoring Tool navigation
We are pleased to announce the release of an upgrade to your Xen tenancy which better integrates the Authoring Tool within the Learning Portal.

This feature was a long requested change, which facilitates navigating to and from the authoring software while working on a course.

What has changed?

You can now access all tools and editing features directly from the course itself, rather than using the Authoring Tool as a separate application.

Until today, accessing the Studio required using the link in the top navigation or typing the URL (typically “edit.yourdomain.com”) in a separate window/tab of your browser, then look for the desired course in the (potentially) long list.
Also, when viewing a live course from the Learning portal (LMS) and clicking on “Edit Page”, the course navigation was lost, preventing you from going back to check the published course.

With this update, the Authoring Tool software loads inside the Learning Portal, and the course header stays visible at all times no matter which feature is accessed.

This means that you can now easily switch between Learning Portal and Authoring Tool, without needing 2 browser tabs/windows.
The tools navigation was also updated to be easier to use.

How are you impacted?

The way you access the Authoring Tool has changed, and you should take note of this update so you can continue to work on courses seamlessly:

The new course toolbar now provides access to all the features from the Authoring Tool:
  • Edit
  • Files
  • Textbooks
  • Pages
  • Updates
  • Grading
  • Certificates
  • Schedule & details
  • Import
  • Export
  • Checklists
  • Advanced settings
This toolbar is available in both the Learning Portal and Studio, to provide consistency in navigation across the Xen.Ed platform.



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Q&A

1. How do I access the Authoring Tool now?

You can now easily swap from Learning portal to the Authoring Tool.

When inside a course, the toolbar provides access to all of Authoring Tool’s features.


For example, clicking “Edit” in the toolbar will take you straight to the Authoring Tool Outline, while maintain the selected course header, and all its features.


… or clicking “Files” will take you to the “Files & Uploads”.



2. How do I create a new course?

To create a new course, select “Create a course” from your dashboard.


This will prompt the “New course” overlay:


You can also select any existing course, and click “Duplicate or re-run the course” to make a copy:


Should you require additional details, have a question, or experience any issue with this update, please do not hesitate to reach out to our team via the Chat widget built in Xen or via email.

We look forward to your feedback with this upgrade.
2022-06-01
New offering
Video streaming & hosting
We are pleased to announce the availability of a new video streaming & hosting service - backed by a vast network of the fastest global providers on the planet and trusted by millions of web properties.

With direct connections to nearly every service provider and cloud provider, the network can reach 95% of the world’s population within approximately 50 ms.

Take a step further with this exciting subscription option, and host your rich media content within our state-of-the-art streaming platform - built to handle storage, encoding, and adaptive bitrate playback for you.

You can upload all common video formats: Xen.Ed will standardise the files for playback on any device and internet connection. Xen.Stream automatically makes multiple resolutions of your video available, and works with adaptive bitrate streaming standards to select the ideal resolution based on the viewer’s device and bandwidth.

Control access to your videos

Secure your videos to only be accessed by learners enrolled into the relevant course!

Do not embed "private links" from Youtube or Vimeo if your video content is too valuable. Xen.Stream ensure that your content cannot be accessed by anyone, even if they managed to get the URL from your learners:
  • Make access private, authenticated, and time-bound.
  • Prevent or allow downloads on a per-video basis
  • Restrict access by IP or Geo.

Contact your Xen.Ed representative to organise your subscription upgrade.
2022-05-02
New feature
H5P support
We are pleased to announce full support for h5p.com via LTI.

What H5P is (and why you should care)?

H5P is an online tool that allows course authors to create Interactives using rich HTML5 content for their courses, including games such as Find the Words, Flashcards, Augmented Reality finder, multimedia apps such as audio recorders and interactive videos, as well as a variety of common and not-so-common question types. 



The h5p.com service is a subscription external to the Xen.Ed platform and integrates with the platform using a new Content Block "H5P (embed)".

How do you use it?

The process of integrating H5P content into your course consists of two steps:
  1. Authoring content on H5P.com.
  2. Adding the LTI Consumer component to your course to load interactives from h5p.com.

Comprehensive installation guide

We have prepared a comprehensive guide to help you configure H5P for Xen.Ed.

We appreciate your feedback on this new feature.
2022-01-04
New Offering
Multi-tenants & sub-organisations support
We are pleased to announce the availability of a new subscription option in Xen.Ed.

With a sub-organisation subscription option, you can now easily invite individual departments, schools, or any groups of customers to their own private portal within your tenancy, and syndicate part or all of your courses to them with full control. 

Sub-organisations invited to the portal get all the tools to onboard & manage their own learners & instructors, so you can easily scale your offering.

Safely share access to your courses

Syndicate your courses and provide access while keeping full ownership of your Intellectual Property. 

Your courses can be used by the sub-organisations for their own learners, while retaining all your branding and preventing modifications or altering of your content. Different training franchises are not visible to each other.

Generate revenue via royalties

Create a new, sustainable revenue stream from your course, without the operational impact and resourcing scale.

Stay in control

Issue licenses for your courses when you invite a sub-organisation. Licenses can have a maximum shelf life, scheduled access, and learners' quotas.

Contact your Xen.Ed representative to organise this exciting upgrade.