Though snow is on the ground – at least here in the northeast – the spring semester is underway and that means a new major release of Junction for our publisher partners and OER course adopters.  With over a dozen new features and functions going live, we’ll focus here on the top five that we think you’ll want to explore immediately.

1. Adoption Dashboard

As we continue to expand our roster of publisher partners, having a seamless way to track and manage adoptions – including enrollments and payments, verifying instructors, granting of edit rights, etc. appeared as a clear way for us to make all of your lives easier.  As a publisher you can get to the new adoption dashboard via the ‘Administration Home’ button you’ll see at the bottom of your course list when you log in.  Want to learn more?  Drop us a line.

2. Item-level feedback to learners

text-based feedback entry box

Another publisher request was the ability for instructors to append feedback to students – either written or audio recording – at the individual item level.  Particularly helpful for learning languages, where proper pronunciation is critical, being able to correct spoken language when not face-to-face is another way instructors can help their students succeed.

3. Upload multiple caption files for videos

select from multiple subtitles while video is playing

With diverse student bodies come diverse needs and we’re happy to support the upload and playback of multiple caption files for instructional videos loaded into Junction.  Add English, Spanish, French or other caption files to any of your videos with just a few clicks.  Students will not only be able to turn on and off captioning, but choose – and even change – their caption language of choice during playback.

4.  Multiple learning components within a tab

As publishers build increasingly rich and deep learning experiences with Junction we were asked to support vertical stacking and scroll of multiple learning components within a single tab.  While not without its challenges, Junction’s engineering team delivered in spades.  Publishers and course authors can now stack up to three components within a tab – for example you could present a video, a short paragraph or two and then a few assessment items.  Interested in a quick demo?  Drop us a line.

5.  Toggle the gradebook view between points and percentages

While some instructors prefer to export final grades from Junction and import them into their campus LMS, we find a growing number of them are using the Junction gradebook to manage their sections end-to-end.  One of the most frequent requests was to toggle the gradebook to show either points or percentages – so here it is!

But that’s not all…we’ve also included:  instructor notifications when items requiring manual scoring have been submitted, support for longer page names in Junction’s Insight Centers, student notifications when grades are posted, a historical view of all submissions by a student on an assessment, a pattern matching option for short text entry items (e.g., if the correct answer is “Chambers” then answers such as “The store was located on Chambers Street” or “Chambers St. was the store he visited” will be marked as correct) and more!

As always, all of these new features and functions are available today to all Junction users and at no additional charge.  We hope you enjoy this release of Junction, it’s our best one yet and we’re looking forward to working with more and more of you in 2018 to enable authors, instructors and learners around the globe.