To view a student's incomplete lessons of your current period, click on the incomplete lessons link:

This will take you to the Incomplete Lessons Page:

In addition to listing the incomplete lessons, this page has some editing and navigation capabilities.  First, you can click on the complete checkbox to complete a lesson:

You can also click to enter or change the time

and the score of a lesson.

Finally, you can click the date to navigate to the planning page for that date.

Note: the incomplete lessons report shows only the lessons for the current period.  If you would like to see incomplete lessons for an earlier period, you can change your period temporarily, run the report, and switch it back when you are done.

Transcripts summarize a student's academic career by showing courses completed and grades earned, mapping them into a standard scale of credits and grade points.

Transcripts support is divided into a number of blog posts:

• Fundamentals
• Parts Of a Transcript
• Creation
• Editing Header Fields
• PDF Generation and Printout
• Reimporting Transcript Periods
  
• Changing Selected Transcript Periods
  
• Editing Credits
  
• Modifying Credits Included in a Period
• Adding credits to a period

To add a credit that is not reflected in your lessons, start by clicking the Select Credits button.  

This displays the Select Credits Dialog.  

In the Select Credits Dialog, click the Add Credit button.  This displays the Add Credit form.

Fill out the form...

 and click the Save button.  The credit is now added.

After adding a period to a transcript, you may want to remove a credit entirely from your transcript, or replace a course credit with a subject credit.

In either case, press the Select Credits button for the period.

This will display the Select Credits Dialog:

From here you can select which credits are included in the transcript.  For example you can:

• Remove a credit by deselecting it
• Force a course without enough hours to qualify as a credit, in the case that not all of the hours were captured in Scholaric
• Chose a subject credit to replace a course credit, for the case when multiple courses are used

In this example, we have two courses, Great Books and Modern Fiction, which together add up to half a credit, but separately do not. 

I'll select the Reading subject, rather than it's course credits.

When finished press the Save button.  Now the half-credit appears

Using the usual click-and-type methods, you can edit a credit's:

• name
• grade
• grade points
• credits 

For example, click on the name to edit

... type in the new name...

... and press the enter key:

Now your name has been modified.  

If you modify the credit grade, the grade points and GPA will update automatically. If credits are edited, the GPA and total credits will be updated.  If you edit grade points, take care to ensure that they are in-line with the scale established for the course (see the scale at the bottom of the transcript).

Editing the grading scale

The grading scale can also be modified, so that, for example an advanced class can be worth more grade points.  To do so, edit the grading scale in the report card for that period.

If you need to change, or add, periods to your transcript, click the Select Periods button:

Then you will see the periods dialog:

Click the Add or Remove buttons as needed.  Then click Done.  

Now your transcript is updated for the new periods.

Since transcripts represent a snapshot of a student's performance at a given time, there will be cases where a transcript needs updating.

The usual case for updating is a transcript created for a period which is in-progress.  In this case, not all lessons are complete, nor are all grades final.

To update a transcript period, click on the Reimport Credits button.

This will recalculate grades according to your grading scales and credits according to the established credit rate for the transcript.  When finished, the following message will appear and confirm completion:

Note: in this case, the reimport had no effect, since there was no changes to the lessons.

A transcript is a summary of a student's performance over an academic career.

A transcript is created by taking a snapshot of report cards on the date it is created, and converting grades into grade points, and hours into credits.

Grades are converted into grade points using their grading scale.

Hours are converted to credits using the rate established when the transcript is created.  This cannot be edited after creation.

Transcripts have Snapshots

Transcripts show a snapshot of a student at a given time - they are not updated unless the user clicks the Reimport Credits button on a period.

There is a great deal of information on a transcript.  The picture below explains what is in what section

Transcripts are typically sent to others. This can be done by printout or PDF generation.

PDF Generation

A PDF of the transcript's contents can be generated by clicking the Export PDF button.

This will create a PDF like the following:

NOTE: If you are using Google Chrome as your browser, you will see the PDF rendered within the browser.  To save it to your disk, use the file menu

Printout

Like other Scholaric pages, the main page can be printed using the browser's file menu, or print hot-key (usually command-P or control-P).  This format is slightly different from the PDF.

After creating your first new transcript you see some empty fields with default text:

• Enter formal name - This is a placeholder for a formal name of either your school or the student's name
• Enter address - This is a placeholder for the student's address
• Enter phone number - This is a placeholder for the student's phone number

Note: After your first transcript, these fields may not be empty - Scholaric will search for the most recent transcript for the student or sibling and pre-populate using that value.

To modify these fields, simply click on a field...

...type the new value...

...and press the enter key.

These fields are optional - if not provided, they will simply be omitted from printouts or PDFs generated.

When you create a student's transcript, you should have several years worth of report cards for that student.  To create a transcript, go to the transcripts tab for the student do the following:

1. Click hit the Add New button.

2. Enter the following fields prior to creation:

• Title - The title appears at the top of the transcript and describes the transcript for the reader.

• Credit Rate - The credit rate is the number of hours required for one credit.  This should be set according to your state's requirements.

• Credit Granularity - The credit granularity is the minimum number of credits that can appear on a transcript.

3. Click the Create button to create the transcript.  

You will see a screen like the following:

Scholaric is currently prompting you to select periods for the transcript.  Ordinarily, this is done when creating the transcripts and never again.  Should you need to change periods later, you can do so using the Select Periods button.

4. To add a period to the transcript, click the green Add button corresponding to the period you want to add. 

5. When finished selecting periods, click the Done button.

Your transcript has now been created.  The next steps are to edit the header fields and create a PDF.

Lesson series are generated in the background.  You will see your dialog will close near immediately, and a quick notice will flash over the course, telling you that the work has started.

Update Oct 2019 - this is back to the foregorund due go delays in starting up background jobs.

In a few seconds you should see an alert, telling you the work is complete, and your row will update automatically:

The alert has some important information:

• How many lessons were created
• Date of the end of the series
• A button to jump to the end of the series
• An x icon to dismiss the alert

Background generation helps with overall system performance, and is enabled for series creation and updates.

Happy Planning 

To edit a lesson series in Scholaric, is like editing a single lesson, with a few differences.

Click on the lesson title to bring up the lesson dialog.  If the lesson is part of a series, you will notice an additional checkbox, to update the series:

Check the Update Series checkbox to indicate that the series should be updated, instead of the individual lesson.  (Note: like series deletion, if you apply to the middle of the series, only the lessons from that date forward will be impacted.)

This populates the description field with the original series description:

To reschedule a lesson series, first click on the first lesson in the series that you want to reschedule, and check the update series checkbox:

Next, click on the Schedule tab:

On this tab, check the Update Repetition Schedule checkbox to reschedule the series:

This makes the Repeat Days set of checkboxes appear.  Modify these checkboxes to modify the schedule:

Finally, click the update button.

Note there is a second set of checkboxes, Bump Schedule, above.  These modify how the lessons react to bumping, not the days they are scheduled.

Happy Planning!

One problem solved by Scholaric is the "Friday Test" problem.  Say you want to create a series Monday-Thursday, and create tests on Friday.  You could create two series, but (in the past), you would have bumping issues, as they would bump independently.

Today, you can specify separately the creation and bumping schedule of a series.  

To do this, when creating a series, click on the Schedule tab, and check the Vary Repeat from Bump Schedule checkbox:

This makes the Repetition Schedule checkboxes appear.  

Now you can specify, for example, Monday-Thursday for the repetition schedule, and Monday-Friday for the bump schedule.

And you can overlay a second series with Friday only as the repetition schedule and Monday-Friday for the bump schedule.  This way, should one of these be bumped, both series will bump together.

Happy Planning

Down Saturday 10/24 for several hours.  Sorry for the inconvenience.

I've just completed a guide for new users.

The Scholaric Jump Start guide helps you get setup and going quickly, and is linked from the help section of the dashboard.

Hope this helps the new users out there.  Apologies to those who needed this before.

Happy Planning

The report card page has an edit button to modify it's settings:

Clicking the edit button shows the settings for each subject and course:

In this mode, you can:

• Change the grading formula
• Edit weights (if a group-weighted grading formula)
• Change the grading scale
• Override the dates used to calculate the grade

Changing the Grading Formula

Editing Weights

Changing the Grading Scale

Overriding the Grading Dates

You can override the start and end dates used to calculate a grade, instead of using the period default. Do this by clicking the Change button next to the grade dates:

This displays the override dates dialog:

Where you can select a new start date, end date, or both, and hit the Update button.  You can remove the override by hitting the Revert button that appears when dates are overridden.

Finally, when you are finished, you can use the Done button (top-right) to exit editing mode.

Happy Planning

Scholaric has several grading formulas for calculating grades

• Point weighted - a lesson is weighted by the number of points possible declared when entering its grade (or 100 if entering a strict percentage).
• Equal weighted - a lesson is weighted equal to every other lesson in the course or subject.
• Time weighted - a lesson is weighted by the amount of time declared.
• Group-point weighted - a grade is calculated from a set of weighted lesson groups,  which themselves will be graded by a point-weighted formula.
• Group-equal weighted - a grade is calculated from a set of weighted lesson groups,  which themselves will be graded by an equal-weighted formula. 

Happy Planning

You can block out your vacation days and holidays in Scholaric using the day's calendar menu:

This allows you to create a named vacation, holiday, or event - either on the student's calendar, or the family's calendar.  Vacations and holidays are considered "days off" for purposes of course generation, and lesson bumping.  They are skipped for consideration of these.  

Events do not block a day off, but simply allow you to label them, to serve as a reminder to you.

After creation, new label appears on that day, along with a menu that allows you to rename or delete the label.  You can then edit the label through the menu or by clicking on the label:

Note: if you have lessons on a date that you want to make a vacation or holiday, I recommend bumping the lessons away first, then creating the holiday for future creating/bumping.

Happy Planning!

Scholaric Students can be reordered two ways:

Drag and Drop

Student Menu

The student menu has a move option to change the order also.  Both mobile and desktop users have this option.

Happy Planning!

Some or you are having issues accessing Scholaric this morning.  This is due to the domain name transfer.

I'm working with the DNS host to resolve the issue.  In the mean time, you can use the scholaric.net scholaric.us or scholaric.biz

Update 7:47 AM Central Time Feb 18th - The underlying issue is fixed, there is one final step in the transfer process that I missed.  Many thanks to Hover's help desk for finding and fixing the issue.

However you may see issues for the next 24 hours.  If so, you can use the above domains, which are not impacted.

Here is how Scholaric Changed in 2014

Letter Grades on Report Cards

Letter grades appear on report cards.  By default, they are 10 point scale grades.  You can modify the the grading scales to your liking, and even have different scales for different courses, as you may need with advanced classes.

Printout Improvements

Printouts can be both reduced and enlarged.  This helps if you printout has an extra page with just a little bit on it, or if your student has vision impairment and needs larger printout.  I also added the ability to add page breaks in weekly printouts.

Bumping Earlier

In addition to traditional bumping, you can now bump earlier, for the cases when one is ahead of schedule.  It happens, really!

Generating Multiple Lessons Per Day

In addition to Lesson Groups, you can generate multiple lessons per day generation which you would want to use to enter scores for each individual lesson.

Links in Printouts

URLs in printouts became clickable links.  Certain links to YouTube videos became embedded videos.  TED talks, look out for us!

Switching Periods

You can temporarily switch periods within the report card or grade book.  Much better than changing period, running report card, and changing period back.

Color Scheme

You can change the background colors in Scholaric.  This helps those of you who have have better taste than I do - that its, all of you.

Payment Processing

I automated the sending of emails when payments failed.  Big time saver for me.  Great timing, because now I'm switching off of Amazon to Stripe.

That's a lot for one guy to do in his spare time.  I'd love to be working on this as my primary job.  Help spread the word.  More good things coming in 2015.

Happy Planning

You may have noticed your first visit to the dashboard each day taking a bit longer than expected.

The dashboard has goal calculations, which involve retrieving the year's lessons from the database, and calculating them.  This is a slow process, so the calculation results are cached.  However, this calculation expires each day at midnight.

So when you first visit Scholaric, the goals for all of your students had to be recalculated.  I've now added a cache primer that runs each night so that your first-visit experience should be a faster one.

Check it out, and let me know if you think it is faster.

Happy Planning

It's fun to look back at the end of a year and see where users live.  At the national level, the visitor heat map looks like this:

With the top 10 countries being:

1. United States (96.06%)
2. Canada (1.06%)
3. Brazil (0.53%)
4. Australia (0.48%)
5. Japan (0.22%)
6. Italy (0.18%)
7. United Kingdom (0.17%)
8. Thailand (0.17%)
9. Russia (0.12%)
10. Mexico (0.09%)

Within the United States, the distribution looks like this:

With the top 10 states being:

1. Missouri (14.01%)
2. North Carolina (12.43%)
3. Texas (7.22%)
4. California (5.20%)
5. Georgia (4.73%)
6. Florida (4.00%)
7. Minnesotta (3.57%)
8. Illinois (3.35%)
9. Michigan (3.15%)
10. Indiana (2.82%)

For the first time, Scholaric has users in all 50 states!  Thanks for helping spread the word to your neighbors.

Happy Planning

I've been working on switching the payments backend from Amazon Flexible Payments System (FPS) to Stripe.

I decided to make this switch in November, after receiving a message from Amazon saying FPS was being replaced with an offering called "Login and Pay with Amazon".  This new system integrates your Amazon login with applications like Scholaric, along with Payments, which it already does today.  I was motivated to try something better than Amazon for several reasons, and I like what I am seeing in Stripe.  Here is what I have found:

• Better support for subscriptions: Amazon provides a token to allow you to charge, a fixed amount monthly.  It’s up to the application to figure out what accounts need to be charged each day and how much.  Things get tricky when payment plans change, or when Amazon changes what it feels constitutes a month.  Stripe charges that fixed amount monthly, and notifies the application when that happens.
• Better support for retrying failed payments: Amazon notifies the application of a failure and then allows it to be recharged. Stripe retries automatically, and notifies the application when it has cancelled the subscription.
• Better test environment: Amazon has a “sandbox” for testing, but I found it lacking, and it has no real way of testing calls Amazon makes back to me.  Stripe has a complete test environment, including the web dashboard, and callbacks, which can be replayed on demand to test them or have a do over if they were handled incorrectly.
• Better customer service:  Amazon, which prides itself on the customer  experience, should be ashamed of the service it provides developers.  I've experienced poor response times on emails, very little oversight of forums, and disputes which don’t get settled.  I’ve even received errant emails telling me they are going to shut down my account because it is "unused", in spite of my charging many times that day!  Stripe gets back to you the day you ask a question, and has been very helpful.  They even look at my code.  In addition, their documentation is so clear and helpful, it answers most of my questions.  They even provide examples in the programming language of choice (Ruby in my case), so many things I need, I can just copy and paste into my code.
• International Payments:  Unbelievably, Amazon does not support international payments for developers.  And, this is only found when a card is charged - no warning is given when it is entered.  Stripe supports these cards.
• Everything Done Through Scholaric.com: The most frustrating biggest struggle with Amazon, was when users got informed of failed payments, they would often enter new card information on Amazon's site, but I would not be able to charge it.  This would cause confusion and delay.  With Stripe, everything is entered and modified on scholaric.com without visiting another site.  But don't worry, credit card information is still stored at Stripe, not with me. 
  

Some of you may ask, "Why not PayPal?"  In addition to being difficult to integrate with, they can (and do) lock out your account for up to 6 months, without warning, or reason.  This effectively puts you out of business.  This is not infrequent, and there is no appeal, no one to help you.  I've hear of this happening when, for example, your sales increase suddenly, and they assume you are a fraud.  Sorry to the PayPal fans out there.

The switch to Stripe will happen gradually, so you will receive a follow-up email when it is time to transfer your subscription.

Happy Planning

You can now change your color scheme.  Go to your account settings and modify the the Background Color and/or Header Color.

Enter a hex CSS color, or valid color name.  rgb() and rgba() colors are not allowed at this time. 

For some examples, I suggest visiting the site http://colours.neilorangepeel.com 

Happy Planning

To edit your account settings, click on your username in the top right corner of Scholaric

This brings up the account dialog, where you can edit your password, email address and other settings.

Happy Planning

The grade book and report card summarize lessons completed within the current period.  Select an alternate period from the period menu located just below the title of the report card...

...or of the grade book...

...and you will see a list of other periods.

This action will display the report using the selected period, without changing your current period, which can be confusing if you forget to change it back. 

Happy Planning