The LatitudeLearning Team is pleased to announce the upcoming release of new Course and User Quick Add enhancements that will be released into Production this coming weekend. In response to customer feedback, the focus of these enhancements is purely on usability for LMS administrators, streamlining the information necessary to create and maintain both course and user records in the LMS. The updates will impact both the appearance and flow of related pages (for all portals), as well as targeted navigational menu options (for newly created portals). Here is a summary of targeted updates that will be available following this weekend's release:

Left-Hand Navigation - Main Menu Updates

• Remove the Instructors menu option and move the item under the Users menu option.
• Similarly, move Add User out of Site Management and move it under Users menu option.
• Additionally, targeted styling and background elements will be updated, impacting the look and feel of this area.

Courses

• Reorganize the user interface on Add/Edit/View pages to streamline the process of adding new courses.
  • Separate fields into General Information and Additional Information.
  • Add sensible defaults to required fields (e.g. default current date as Course Display and Open Enrollment Dates when adding a new course to the catalog).
• Hide unused fields from the standard administrative interface.
• Only show course Delivery Methods (course types) that are truly available in the portal (e.g. hide Virtual Classroom or Assessment or Subscription options if not current contracted/available to this portal).
• Move the course actions for non-ILT courses to the details page instead of having a separate actions page.
• Supplemental teaching languages added and incorporated into a 2-column format. This affects courses, instructors, offerings, resource training kit items (places that retrieve a list of languages based on teaching).
  • Chinese - China
  • English
  • French - Canada
  • French - France
  • German - Germany
  • Italian - Italy
  • Japanese - Japan
  • Korean - Korea
  • Spanish - Mexico
  • Spanish - Spain
• SCORM Tab - Changed test launch languages to a 2-column list.
• Course Add - Upon save/submit you are now presented with a dialog that helps you decide what to do next, providing for a more wizard-driven approach.
• Reduced size of multi-line text fields, instead making them auto-grow as you type (also available on instructor profile page).

Users

• Similar to Courses above, work was done to reorganize the user interface on add/edit/view pages to streamline the process of adding new users, including:
  • Separate fields into General Information and Additional Information.
  • Add sensible defaults to required fields, including portal default values for location and position.
• Move minor help text to a rollover on a Help icon by the field to reduce screen clutter.
• User Add - Upon save, you are given a dialog that helps you decide what to do next.

LMS Information

• Added support for setting a Default Location and Default Position Code which are used as defaults when adding users.
• Move minor help text to a rollover on a Help icon by the field to reduce screen clutter.

Course Search

• Removed columns for Major, Cost, and Duration, moving cost and duration into the description.
• Allow course Code and Name to break on '_' characters to reduce total width in some cases we have seen.

Page Layout

• Page styling was updated to enhance the look and feel of the new presentation. Detailed updates include:
  • Added a base.css stylesheet that all portals inherit, and may override in their portal stylesheet.
  • Changed the default page footer style to go full width (on new portals only).
  • Changed styling for new portals to fixed width. 
  • Updated styling of popup confirmation boxes, such as for the logout button. 

Page Header

• Similarly, the header was restyled to include the following updates: 
  • Fixed styling in fixed-width page layouts, so the header appears within the main content area instead of off to the far right. 
  • Cleaned up the styling and improving the ability to override the CSS styles.
  • Additionally, extraneous text was removed from the page breadcrumb that said "You are here"

Additional Page and Styling Updates

• Give these pages a new, cleaner styling (some of this was done to Offering pages as well): 
  • Course/User/Offering summary at the top is now cleaner and simpler. 
  • Borders were removed to reduce the "box of boxes" effect.

Additional Software Assurance Updates included in this promotion:

• Fixed calendar popup issues in IE8 (and Chrome, FireFox?). 
• Portal Creation - A fix was put in place to Allow portals to be created with ampersand in the name.

Thank you again for your ongoing interest and input to improve the capabilities of LatitudeLearning LMS...And we look forward to making these enhancements available as part of this weekend's Scheduled Maintenance Window, starting Friday at 10PM EST. For additional information regarding these and other capabilities of the LatitudeLearning LMS, access our product support site at www.LatitudeLearning.com, or contact our Support team directly at Support@LatitudeLearning.com.