January 2026 release notes

When a tutor, learner or employer is using the actions section of a review and they want to understand who created or closed actions, they can now:

• See the name of the user who created each action.
• See the name of the user who closed each action.

This change makes it easier for users to quickly identify the right people, streamline follow-up discussions, and improve overall collaboration during the review process.

When a user interacts with the Aptem Virtual Assistant (AVA) to ask a question, they can now see a friendly holding message after 5 seconds while the system prepares the actual response.

This change improves the user experience by reducing perceived wait time and making interactions feel more natural, encouraging greater adoption of the Virtual Assistant.

When a learner uses the Virtual Assistant to ask questions and OpenAI is unavailable, they can now see a clear, actionable error message explaining the issue and how to resolve it.

This change ensures error messages accurately reflect the situation, are visually distinct, accessible, and can be dismissed by the user. The Virtual Assistant no longer displays misleading configuration errors and remains stable during OpenAI outages.

Users may need to retry their actions or follow the guidance provided in the error message.

The learner timeline widget now shows the correct status for learners with a future start date. Programmes will remain marked as Ongoing until the end date or planned end date is reached, preventing premature Completed statuses. This improves the accuracy of progress monitoring; users may notice updated statuses when reviewing learner timelines.

We're excited to announce that we have begun development on a brand-new off-the-job hours logging feature. Our goal is to provide a more intuitive and efficient way for apprentices to record all their learning hours, making it easier to track progress and ensure compliance. This functionality will also offer improved oversight and reporting for providers. We're actively engaging with customers at this point. Customers who wish to be involved with the upcoming beta program should reach out to their IC or CSM.

Grouped marking aid attempts in 'Evidence Summary'

The 'Evidence Summary' will support grouped marking aid submission attempts under a single evidence item. Instead of creating separate evidence uploads for each attempt, all marking aid exercise versions will be stored and accessible within one consolidated record.

Users will be able to expand the evidence item to view and download all marked exercise PDF versions from the 'Assessment Report 'section. This will streamline navigation, preserve full attempt history, and improve the overall marking aid workflow without affecting non-marking aid functionality.
 

Clean marking aid PDFs for 'Evidence Summary'

Users will be able to generate a clean, unmarked version of marking aid exercise PDFs, containing only the learner’s questions and answers. This will help providers meet compliance requirements and remove the need to manually create separate clean PDFs.

Centralised exercise editing

• Based on customer feedback requesting greater control over who can edit exercise content, exercise editing will be centralised to the marking aid admin dashboard.
• The ability to edit exercise content from Programme Builder and learning plan components in Console will be removed in a future release (targeted for February 2026).
• This change simplifies the editing process, reduces confusion, and ensures exercise amendments are managed from a single, controlled location by authorised users only.