May 2024 Release notes

In order to give customers greater reporting and forecasting abilities with regards to the Reviews functionality, we have surfaced review custom sections, including their responses via a new OData feed.

The new OData feed surfaces the following sections:

• Core Topics
• EPA Gateway
• Individual Support Needs/ Requirements
• Short and Long Term Goals
• Comments
• RAG

For more information, see: Surfacing Review Responses in OData and Retrieving Review responses via OData.

Individual reports - Learning Plan Components drilldown

When a Tutor wants to monitor Learners' progress across various curriculum components and Knowledge, Skills & Behaviours (KSBs), they can navigate to the Learning Plan Components tab in the individual Checkpoint reporting screens and track Learners' progress across specific curriculum components and evaluate their progress in developing KSBs. This helps Tutors provide targeted support and ensure Learners meet learning objectives. They can do the following:

1. View KSB details in the Learning Plan Components grid: Click on a button within each row to access more detailed information about the KSBs associated with a specific learning plan component.

2. Assess progress for each KSB: View a progress bar for each KSB, giving a visual representation of the learner's advancement. The progress bar represents the progress the Learner has made towards completing the KSB mapped to the associated Learning Plan Components. Each KSB can be associated with multiple Learning Plan Components. All Learning Plan Components that a KSB is mapped to will need to be completed for the progress bar to reach 100%. This progress matches the progress bars displayed within the Learning Plan functionality.

3. Check percentage of completion: See the percentage of completion for each KSB, providing a quantitative measure of progress.

Removed Checkpoint results from the Learner Profile

Cancelling Reviews in Aptem

When a Tutor cancels a Review (by deleting the Review instance or the Review Learning Plan Component in Aptem), the event will also be cancelled in Teams. The Learner will receive a cancellation notification via email. This ensures the Tutor and Learner calendars in Teams remain in sync with their Aptem calendar.

Cancelling Meetings in Aptem

When a Tutor cancels a Meeting (by deleting the Meeting Learning Plan Component in Aptem), the event will also be cancelled in Teams. The Learner will receive a cancellation notification via email. This ensures the Tutor and Learner calendars in Teams remains in sync with their Aptem calendar.

Use Teams for Placements/Workshops

When a Tutor in Aptem marks a placement as online (by selecting 'Meet Online' in the placement screen), the URL to join the meeting will be added to all future placement/workshop tasks, so that users can join the Teams meeting from Aptem.

When a Tutor in Aptem marks a placement as online (by selecting "Meet Online" in the placement screen), the URL to join the meeting will be added to all future placement/workshop tasks, so that users can join the Teams meeting from Aptem.

As a Learner, I can access the link via the associated Placement/Workshop task.

As a Tutor, I can start the Teams meeting from the Placement/Workshop screen.

The Tutor must be the owner of the Placement/Workshop to see the meeting link. If the owner is changed, the Tutor should click "Meet Offline" and "Meet Online" to generate a new link for the new owner (this will be automated in future). Meetings flagged as "Meet Online" before this is enabled will need to be re-marked as "Meet Online" to trigger the link generation.

Please note that this will not schedule meetings in the Tutor or Learner calendar.

For more information, see:

• Using the Communications Connector with Teams for Reviews and Meetings
• Using the Communications Connector with Teams for Placements/Workshops
• Setting up the Communications Connector with Teams.

To know more about getting access to the Communications Connector with Teams, please contact your CSM.

Since the last release, the following updates to the Reporting functionality have been made and released as a minor release:

• When an MIS manager is using the Quality dashboard and they want to see the correct number of Learners that have passed their planned end date. They can do this on the accountability page, there are 3 measures that split those Learners into the amount of days past: <180, 180-364, and 365+. These measures now include Learners that are still in learning but have completed all their learning activities, but the outcomes are not yet known (status 1 & outcome 8).
• When an MIS manager is using the Quality dashboard and wants to be able to view the Qualification Achievement Rates (QAR) by funding category/model, there is now a filter on all the QAR pages; Headline, Gender & Disability, Age & Ethnicity, Functional Skills, that enables them to select the information this way. By default, Apprenticeships is selected as default. Adult Skills and Traineeships and Study Programmes categories data can also now be viewed within QAR pages when using the applicable funding category filter. 

• Previously, if an Administrator used the bulk upload for users and did not include the Auth type, SAML Idp, and SAML Unique Id fields in the uploaded CSV, these fields would be over-written and the users affected would be set to the default Aptem authentication. Now the values in these fields are not altered if they are not included in the upload as expected.
• New starts on Traineeships closed on 31/07/2023. We have added dynamic validation on the available programme types based on learning start date. This will aid those managing the ILR by removing the possibility of selecting this invalid programme type.
• We have implemented a change to the Change of Employer process automation tracker to account for when the ERN for both employers is 999999999. In this situation, upon processing the tracker, a new employment status record will be created with the OET3 flag checked.
• We have amended how deleted users appear within Aptem. In areas such as the 'Invited by' column on the Users grid, where deleted records may have previously been linked to existing active users, these deleted records will appear as 'Anonymised'. Active users' details will remain as they are today. The anonymisation process at Aptem ensures that personal identifiable information (PII) associated with deleted records is not retained and so does not appear in the UI or elsewhere. This allows Aptem to remain compliant with data privacy policies. As per Aptem's anonymisation process, a period of 30 days is given between the deletion request and these values appearing as 'Anonymised'. This period is given to allow records to be recovered if required.

• Previously, when Learners used SCORM assets and added multiple text boxes using the 'add another' feature, there was a risk that their answers would be truncated in the generated asset report .pdf. This posed a problem, as Learners could lose crucial information, and instructors would not receive complete data on Learner responses. With the recent fix, this issue has been resolved. Now, regardless of the number of additional text boxes Learners add, the entire content is captured and displayed correctly in the .pdf asset report.

• The following areas have been made accessibility-friendly and they now conform to WCAG 2.1 guidelines, and can be navigated through a keyboard or a screen reader:

  • Tutor view of filters on the Caseload dashboard screen

  • Tutor view of notifications on the Caseload dashboard screen

  • Navigation tabs on the Tutor view of the Learner Profile screen

Our exciting development of Aptem Enhance continues with Aptem Assistant. Leveraging the power of AI, Aptem Assistant will initially support Learners on questions relating to their specific apprenticeship standard. We have many more capabilities planned for Aptem Assistant over the rest of 2024 - more news in future announcements! Our early access version is expected to be available for beta testing soon. Please contact your CSM for information on how to get involved with Aptem Enhance.

We are further developing Aptem Assess, to provide additional learning support resources, accessible via the resource centre, which can be used to modify a Learner’s learning plan.

We are working on a self-serve document creation tool that will allow customers to create and maintain their own compliance documents based on Aptem templates from one central point. Customers can designate templates that will apply by programme and start date. This will have the following benefits:

• Customers will be able to maintain compliance document templates without the need to clone and rebuild programmes. This will remove a significant administrative burden placed on customers whenever a new version of a template is released.
• Disassociating the templates from specific programmes and sharing them from a central location will further reduce the burden of maintaining the same document in multiple programmes.
• Reduces the time spent on applying new templates which will allow our customers to deploy their resources to more Learner-facing activities.
• This will enable the release of smaller and more frequent improvements which will allow us to maintain the compliance of our document templates.