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Entrada 1.6.0 Now Available

The Entrada project team is pleased to announce the release of Entrada version 1.6.0. This newest release includes some very exciting new features, and significant refinements to some existing features, further empowering our users within Entrada. I would like to thank each of our Entrada Community Partners for your extensive contributions to this release.

What’s New?

In addition to many user interface and user experience improvements to existing areas within Entrada you will find the following platform enhancements:

AAMC Curriculum Inventory Reporting

As part of our commitment to developing a highly flexible, interoperable and robust integrated teaching and learning environment we have added the ability to export the curriculum within Entrada to the MedBiquitous Curriculum Inventory data standard (ANSI/MEDBIQ CI.10.1-2013). This XML formatted export allows you seamlessly upload your curriculum to the AAMC Curriculum Inventory Portal. This exciting feature is available to Entrada Community Partners as part of consortium membership. For more information on using or obtaining this feature, please contact us.

Recurring Learning Events

Creating repeating events within Entrada just became a whole lot easier thanks to the new ability to schedule recurring Learning Events. This powerful feature enables you to create daily, weekly, or monthly recurring Learning Events with a variety of advanced options. Updating content within these recurring events can be done at high level or a very granular level, empowering you to leverage your recurring events without being handcuffed by cascading changes that you didn’t want to make.

Synchronize Course Enrolment

Having course enrolment synchronized with your institution’s Student Information System was previously possible within Entrada through the use of a scheduled script. However, thanks to a new feature, administrators and course directors can now synchronize on-demand to get students into their courses without any waiting.

Synchronize Small Groups

In addition to being able to synchronize course enrolment on the fly you can now synchronize small groups for a course. This feature will detect if there are any small groups already being maintained within your Student Information System and if any groups are found the group structure will be duplicated, synchronized and maintained within Entrada automatically.

Learner Activity and Statistical Information

This new feature gives administrators and faculty members the ability to see how many of their learners have accessed the learning event and it’s material. These statistics and history can then be used to identify which learning events are being accessed less than other events so that action can be taken to improve the quality of these events, and the learning material associated with them.

BasicLTI Integration

Our continuing effort to increase the interoperability of Entrada with third-party learning tools has brought us to add BasicLTI Consumer support to Entrada. System administrators and faculty members can now connect to external BasicLTI Providers through the Course Website / Community system, as well as through Learning Events. This feature works great for connecting to Library systems, Publisher platforms, and external learning tools.

MeSH Keywords Support

Administrators and faculty members now have the ability to link MeSH keywords to both Courses and Learning Events within Entrada. This important features allows for impressive reports that demonstrate where exactly linked MeSH keywords are taught throughout your entire curriculum.

Clinical Encounter Logging Enhancements

Entrada Mobile now allows learners to log clinical encounters easily and efficiently from within the mobile app (available for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry 10). This feature gives your learners the freedom to enter what they learn on the fly while it is fresh in their minds.

Quiz Module Question Grouping

When attaching quizzes to Learning Events or Course Websites, faculty members can have the option to randomize the questions within the quiz. In most scenarios this feature has worked very well, except for when certain quiz questions needed to be grouped together. The perfect example of this presented itself when a quiz had case based questions in it and those questions needed to remain in sequence. Randomizing such a quiz would move case based questions in with other random quiz questions resulting in a question sequence that did not make sense. Now when authoring a quiz, faculty members can group those sets of questions together, while still having the benefits of randomizing the overall quiz.

First Time Login Terms of Use / Copyright Agreement

System administrators can now configure Entrada to require users to accept a terms of use or copyright agreement, along with attesting that any material uploaded does not violate any copyright laws. This feature ensures that all users have acknowledged that their use of the system is bound by institutional policy.

Course Specific Learning Event Calendars

Faculty, staff, and students can subscribe to their own activity-based Entrada calendar, or they can subscribe to specific calendars for specific courses. Providing Entrada users with even more ways to view and manage their schedules.

Linking Gradebook Assessments to Learning Events

Included in Entrada 1.6 is the ability to link assessments to learning events. This feature allows you to maintain linkages across your whole curriculum; linking assessments to events, events to courses and curriculum objectives to all four. This provides you with a powerful tool for tracking and reporting on your curriculum in both how it is delivered and how it is assessed.

Learning Event Draft Schedule Import Enhancements

Importing Learning Events into Entrada just got easier. The CSV import tool now allows administrators and faculty members to import Comma Separated Values (CSV) data in any column order they wish. The new column mapping feature then allows you to map required and non-required Entrada fields to the columns in your file.

Gradebook Assignment Dashboard Notices

When attaching an Assignment Dropbox to a Gradebook Assessment administrators and faculty members now have the option of automatically notify the affected learners through a Dashboard Notice.

Default Community Template Facelift

Entrada communities just got a whole new look and feel thanks to the redesigned default template. The redesigned template gives your community a sleek more modern look and feel while making the user experience that much more enjoyable. Entrada 1.6 also allows for media to be embedded within announcements, discussion posts, and more.

Developers Rejoice

As part of the Entrada 1.6 release we have upgraded many of the internal components that make Entrada tick, such as Zend Framework, ADOdb, CKEditor, HTMLPurifier, Smarty, etc. This makes working within Entrada a breeze for developers looking to leverage new features within these components.

For more detailed information on any of these features you can go through the closed Issues for the 1.6.0 Milestone on GitHub.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement please contact:

Matt Simpson
Manager, Education Technology
Faculty of Health Sciences, Queen’s University
Website: http://entrada-project.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146
E-Mail:[email protected]

A New Entrada – Entrada 1.5.1

A new community partner, a new collaborative software development platform, and a fancy new Entrada software release. Welcome to Entrada 1.5.1.

Welcome David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA

We are pleased to officially announce that the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA has joined the Entrada consortium as our 4th official Entrada Community Partner. With the help of their focused and driven software developers, not to mention feedback from their world renowned medical educators, we have already seen great contributions from them to Entrada software. Thank-you, welcome, and we are very excited to be working with you.

Entrada on GitHub

In our continuing efforts to improve project collaboration, visibility, and efficiency we have moved and consolidated our software development management into the world’s largest open source community, GitHub. GitHub’s robust platform now powers our code management, issue management, and documentation wiki. Fork us on GitHub!

Entrada 1.5.0 and 1.5.1 Released

It is with great pleasure that the Entrada development community announces the immediate availability of Entrada 1.5.1 from the downloads page of the Entrada website, as well as the master branch of our Git repository.

Entrada 1.5.0 was released in July but never received a proper release announcement on our website. This release announcement will therefore cover new and modified features in both versions of Entrada.

  • Entrada Mobile 1.5 (iOS, Android, and BlackBerry 10 compatible)
  • Newly redesigned Entrada interface utilizing Twitter Bootstrap and HTML5
  • New ability to explore and browse the mapped curriculum with Curriculum Explorer
  • New ability for learners to submit, and staff / faculty to approve observership requests
  • New ability for learners to maintain a clinical encounter log book
  • Streamlined message centre for students that replaced dashboard notices
  • Significantly improved objective set management at the organizational level
  • Significantly improved curriculum mapping interface at course, learning event, and assessment level
  • Significantly improved user and administrative sides of clerkship management
  • Streamlined attendance tracking for learning events
  • Streamlined course gradebook and assignment dropbox functionality
  • Streamlined ability to synchronize class lists with centrally provided LDAP information
  • Ability to add descriptive text, page breaks, and question randomization to quizzes
  • Ability to select the fields that are included when exporting learning events
  • Ability to add custom user profile fields for users in certain departments
  • Ability to time release objectives within learning events
  • Ability to record late submissions and resubmissions for assessments
  • Ability to create “public notices” that appear on the Entrada login page
  • New integrated rich text editor for better end-user experience
  • Increased password hash security
  • Removed unmaintained Tasks module
  • Removed old documentation, unit tests, and unmaintained developer tools

For more information on any of these features you can go through the closed issues for 1.5.0 and 1.5.1 on GitHub. Please be advised that the 1.5.0 release took place during the transition to GitHub so some new features / issues may not be documented here.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement please contact:

Matt Simpson
Manager, Education Technology
School of Medicine, Queen’s University

Website: http://entrada-project.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146
E-Mail: [email protected]

Entrada 1.4.0 Release Announcement

The Entrada development community is pleased to announce the availability of Entrada 1.4.0 from the downloads page of the Entrada website, as well as the master branch of our Git repository.

This release introduces many new features, enhancements, and over all improvements to the platform including:

  • Entrada Mobile 1.1 for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry + Playbook
  • Ability to create draft schedules for Learning Events.
  • Ability to import CSV files of Learning Events into a new draft.
  • Ability to take attendance (including Kiosk Mode for student card swiping).
  • Ability to filter Learning Events by Department (based on department of associated teachers).
  • Ability to see the history of a particular Learning Event (who add / edited / delete what from Event Content).
  • Hot Topics are now displayed to students in the Student View of Learning Events page.
  • Ability to randomize question order (in addition to response order) in Quizzes.
  • Ability to automatically import grades from a Quiz to a Gradebook Assessment.
  • Ability to see which users selected what response on Quiz results page.
  • Entrada Users can now have multiple groups and roles, and even belong to multiple Organisations.
  • Ability to Manage Departments from System Settings
  • Usability enhancements to the Manage Community Members section.
  • Ability to upload multiple files at once to a Community.
  • Significant improvements to the Evaluation and Assessment tools in Entrada including:
    • E-mail notification to evaluators of evaluations they must complete.
    • Ability for faculty to assess learners.
    • Ability for learners to assess themselves.
    • Ability for learners to assess their peers.
    • Faculty members can now view the results of evaluations that have been done on them.
    • Course Directors can now see evaluation reports of their courses.

A full list of new features, fixes and enhancements is available from the Entrada 1.4.0 Roadmap. To obtain the Entrada 1.4.0 PHP source code please visit the downloads section of our website or visit the Sourceforge project page.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement please contact:

Matt Simpson
Manager, Education Technology
School of Medicine, Queen’s University

Website: http://entrada-project.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146

Entrada 1.3.0 Release Announcement

The Entrada development team is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Entrada 1.3.0 from the downloads page of the Entrada website, as well as the master branch of our Git repository.

This release introduces several new features, and over a hundred fixes and other various enhancements including:

  • Better multi-organisation support to allow more than one institution to co-exist within the same Entrada installation.
  • Addition of a System Settings module that allows administrators to manage organisations, and many of the data lookup tables like Curriculum Types, Event Types, Hot Topics, Meta Data, and Objectives.
  • A new assignment system within the Gradebook to facilitate handing in, marking, and returning assignments to learners.
  • Ability to select from multiple templates when you are creating or updating a community.
  • Ability to export Learning Events from the Manage Events section.
  • Ability to select the encryption method you would like the authentication client / server to use.

A full list of new features, fixes and enhancements is available from the Entrada 1.3.0 Roadmap. To obtain the Entrada 1.3.0 PHP source code please visit the downloads section of our website or visit the Sourceforge project page.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement please contact:

Matt Simpson
Senior Web Developer
Medical Education Technology Unit
School of Medicine, Queen’s University

Website: http://entrada-project.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146

Entrada 1.3.0 Beta 1 Available

We are pleased to announce the Entrada 1.3.0 Beta 1 is now available in the beta-1.3.0 branch of the Entrada Git repository. Our testing is very nearly finished, and we hope to provide an Entrada 1.3.0 final release on Tuesday, April 10th.

Matt Simpson
Senior Web Developer
Medical Education Technology Unit
School of Medicine, Queen’s University

Website: http://entrada-project.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146

Entrada 1.2.0.1 Minor Release

The Entrada development team has now released Entrada 1.2.0.1. This minor release primarily resolves an issue with the initial database installation, an issue with deployment on Windows servers, and some minor Internet Explorer 8+ incompatibilities. We have also taken steps to prepare for the upcoming Entrada 1.3 release in a few months.

Entrada 1.2.0.1 can be downloaded from the downloads page of our website or by cloning theGit master branch. For a full list of fixes and enhancements please review the Entrada 1.2.0.1 Roadmap.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement please contact:

Matt Simpson
Senior Web Developer
Medical Education Technology Unit
School of Medicine, Queen’s University

Website: http://entrada-project.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146

Entrada 1.2.0 Release Announcement

The Entrada development team is pleased to announce the release of Entrada 1.2.0, which is available now from the Entrada downloads page and Git master branch. While new features, existing feature enhancements, and of course bug fixes are often highly anticipated in new releases we would like to take a moment to praise the optimization work that has gone into the 1.2 release. At least a few developers have spent time examining slower areas of the application, and speeding it up significantly by doing code and database query optimization.

In addition to the optimization work that has taken place for this release, we have a number of new features and enhancements to highlight as well:

  • Ability to add complex meta-data to user profiles. (i.e. immunization records, etc.)
  • A new Evaluation module to handle course and teacher evaluation.
  • A new “Hot Topic” tagging feature for learning events.
  • New event type reports that display the different methods of teaching going on in the curriculum.
  • A new developer tool that gives administrators the ability remark completed quizzes.
  • Added support of faculty to view their teaching schedule via iCalendar feeds.
  • Ability to copy existing learning events.
  • Ability to attach quizzes to an existing community.
  • Ability for learners to see their assignment marks via the grade book.
  • A number of enhancements to the tasks module.
  • Extended support for student roles.
  • Increased speed and optimization throughout Entrada.

A full list of new features, fixes and enhancements is available from the Entrada 1.2.0 Roadmap. To obtain the Entrada 1.2.0 PHP source code please visit the downloads section of our website or visit the Sourceforge project page.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement please contact:

Matt Simpson
Senior Web Developer
Medical Education Technology Unit
School of Medicine, Queen’s University

Website: http://entrada-project.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146

Entrada 1.1.0 Release Announcement

The Entrada development team is pleased to announce the immediate release of Entrada 1.1.0, the much anticipated successor to our first open source release from May, 2010. Entrada 1.1 contains many new features, and a myriad of enhancements and fixes including but not limited to:

  • A new module for Medical Student Performance Record (MSPR) management
  • A new module for regional education and learner accommodation management
  • A new module for faculty annual report generation
  • A new module to handle student grades via a grade book
  • Enhanced curriculum objective and clinical presentation management and mapping
  • A new module to handle tasks or todo list items for learners

A full list of new features, fixes and enhancements is available from the Entrada 1.1.0 Roadmap. To obtain the Entrada 1.1.0 PHP source code please visit the downloads section of our website or visit the Sourceforge project page.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement, please contact:

Matt Simpson
Senior Web Developer
Medical Education Technology Unit
School of Medicine, Queen’s University

Website: http://entrada-project.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146

Entrada 1.0.0 Release Announcement

The Entrada development team consisting of Queen’s University, Medical Education Technology Unit in collaboration with University of Calgary, Office of Undergraduate Medical Education, and the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, is pleased to announce the release of the open source Entrada 1.0.0 teaching and learning platform. This important release marks the end of our internal development cycle and the beginning of what we are sure will become an open and vibrant community dedicated to enhancing teaching and learning through the use of technology.

To obtain Entrada 1.0.0 please visit the downloads section of our website, and for those of you who wish to follow our project milestones and progress please visit our Sourceforge projectwhere our Subversion repository and Trac system will be made available shortly.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement, please contact:

Matt Simpson
Senior Web Developer
Medical Education Technology Unit
School of Medicine, Queen’s University

Website: http://entrada-project.org
Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146

Entrada 0.8.4 Release Announcement

The Entrada development team is pleased to announce that the Entrada 0.8.4 release has been tagged in our subversion repository. This development release has several new features and fixes including, but not limited to:

  • New Clerkship Logbook Functionality: Clerkship students can now keep a detailed logbook of their clerkship experience from rotation-to-rotation, and administrators can easily review these logs and see when learners are missing key clinical experiences.
  • New Manage Core Clerkship Rotation Management: Clerkship administrators can now manage clerkship students’ core rotations in addition to the already existing clerkship elective management workflow.
  • New Student Dashboard Calendar: A new Javascript weekly calendar and custom ICS & JSON calendar feed is available for students from the Entrada student dashboard. This new calendar handles overlapping, individual and modified events very nicely.
  • New Entrada Community Notifications: Community members can now be notified via e-mail when something happens in a community they are a member of. More notification updates will be coming in subsequent releases; however, the notification support covers Announcements, Events, Photo Galleries, and Document Sharing modules.
  • Community Polling Updates: Community administrators can now add entire classes at once to the eligible poller list.
  • Lockout Policy Displays Attempts: Invalid login attempt count is now displayed on the login page so you don’t get locked out without knowing that it is going to happen.
  • Current Users Online: The list of currently online users should now be more accurate.

A full list of features and fixes are available in the Entrada 0.8.4 milestones in Trac.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement, please contact:

Matt Simpson
Senior Web Developer
Medical Education Technology Unit
School of Medicine, Queen’s University

Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146

Entrada 0.8.3.1 Release Announcement

The Entrada development team is pleased to announce that the Entrada 0.8.3.1 release has been tagged in our subversion repository, and has also been successfully deployed to the some local Entrada instances. This significant release is the result of the hard work of a number of individuals and collaborations, and it strongly represents the next step on our path to a 1.0 open source release.

Some of the newly introduced enhancements, although there are many more, include:

  • New Permission System: The permission system that handles all of the access controls within Entrada was re-developed using the powerful Zend_ACL component of Zend Framework. This is a great example of our continued commitment to move towards a full embrace of the open source Zend Framework.
  • New Learning Event Filtering Interface: A user friendly, highly functional Javascript multi-select interface was developed for the Learning Event filtering system. This new interface introduces find-as-you-type searches, filterable categories and more.
  • New Clerkship Electives Component: Clerkship students now have the ability to submit their electives for approval directly through Entrada. Once the pending elective has been approved through a configurable work flow, the elective appears to the student on their official Clerkship schedule.
  • Community Guest Users: Community administrators can now add guest users to their community who do not already have an account in the Entrada authentication system. These users will then only be granted access to the specific community.
  • Community Mailing Lists: Each community in Entrada can now create and manage their own community mailing list, which is powered by Google Hosted Apps. Mailing lists can be configured to be announcement only (messages accepted and sent only from Community administrators) or discussion lists (messages accepted and sent from any Community member).
  • Course Websites: Entrada Courses can now be “linked” to existing Entrada Communities, the result of which is a very powerful but easy to use content management system powering your course websites. This tight course / community integration also brings with it:
    • A new template for course website “communities” that looks like the default Entrada interface.
    • A consistent set of pre-defined pages that will make automatic syllabus generation possible.
    • A course calendar that automatically displays scheduled Learning Events from Entrada for the course.
    • Automatic administrator provisioning based on Course Directors, Curriculum Coordinators, etc.
  • Community RSS and iCalendar Feeds: Many of the Community modules including Announcements, Events, and Discussions, have RSS feeds available on a per-page basis in this release. In addition any Events pages also have an iCalendar (ICS) feed that allows community members to subscribe to the calendar in many calendaring applications (i.e. Apple’s iCalendar, Outlook, Sunbird, Google Calendar, etc) as well as other mobile devices.

A full list of features and fixes are available in the Entrada 0.8.3 and 0.8.3.1 milestones in Trac.

Finally, I would like to give a special thank-you to Harry Brundage for his valuable development contributions this summer, and Dr. Lindsay Davidson of the REAL Project for providing his funding. Harry has been an important contributor to the Entrada team this past summer, and we look forward to his continued off-site presence while he attends McGill University. Also a special thank-you to Marta Majkut for her documentation contributions to the Entrada project over the summer, which will without a doubt be a useful resource to the Entrada user community for a long time.

For further information or clarification regarding information contained in this release announcement, please contact:

Matt Simpson
Senior Web Developer
Medical Education Technology Unit
School of Medicine, Queen’s University

Telephone: +1 613-533-6000 x78146

Entrada 0.8.2 Release Announcement

Entrada 0.8.2 has just been tagged in our subversion repository and can now be merged into your local Entrada instances. If you are wondering what happened to version 0.8.1, well it just so happens that we finished both releases at roughly the same time so we decided to only tag the 0.8.2 release.

Entrada 0.8.2 resolves many known bugs, extends further compatibility to older versions of Internet Explorer, introduces the highly anticipated Quiz Module, and community Mailing Lists (via Google Hosted Apps), as well as gives community administrators the ability to add multiple quiz questions to a poll, to name a few.

A full list of features and fixes are available in the Entrada 0.8.1 and 0.8.2 milestones in Trac.

Entrada 0.8 Release Announcement

We are pleased to announce that the Entrada 0.8 release has been tagged and is ready to be merged into your local Entrada instance. This release adds many new features including notification support for communities, new RSS and iCalendar support for the majority of community modules, ability to create multiple module pages with unique content with a community (i.e. 2 forum or announcement pages), support for creating and distributing electronic quizzes, significant changes to the people search module, many changes to the learning events tab, and more.

A full list of features and enhancements is available in the Entrada 0.8.0 milestone in Trac.

Entrada 0.7.1 Release Announcement

We are pleased to announce that the Entrada 0.7.1 release has been tagged and is ready to be merged into your local Entrada instance. This release adds a few new features, and fixes several bugs on our way to the 0.8 release. A full list of features and enhancements is available in the Entrada 0.7.1 milestone in Trac.