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2024 Brainshark Release Notes

Updated

Please find below all product release notes to the Brainshark platform in 2024. If you have any questions, please contact support@bigtincan.com. 

December 3rd, 2024

Authoring

  • “Merge” Refinements 
    • Slides > Import Slides > Brainshark
      • Restored the ability to insert a slide from the same presentation (effectively giving you Copy Slide)
      • Importing a video slide from the same presentation now works
        • Additionally, importing doc slides and web slides from the same presentation now works
    • Tools > Merge Slide Content
      • Restored the ability to merge slide content from the same presentation
      • Tightened up the ability to merge content - limiting it to same slide types in Modern to provide a predictable result.
        • Merging Document slides (Word, Excel, PDF) now works as expected
        • Merge of Web Slides (URL & HTML5) now works as expected 
        • Video to video is the one slide type you cannot merge content with. Use Import slide instead

Learning

  • Ability to enroll student and mark student as complete in a closed session using the batch enroll feature on the manage course sessions page.
  • Ability to re-enroll students from within User>Enrollments Page in Administration
    • NOTE: This initial release will not allow for editing email templates due to having the ability to select various content types in bulk for re-enrollment (Workaround is to edit the default email templates to support bulk re-enrollment)

November 14th, 2024

Learning

  • Ability to require students to select session at time of enrollment in course event 
    • Learning Authors can now set course events to require students to select a session at the     time of enrollment.  When enabled, clicking on the card in the course catalog will trigger a new course details page. Student can go back to the course catalog or select session (top  right) and then enroll.

Platform

  • Unified Profile - Unified profile will be available for enablement in identity. Once enabled, Users will see updated avatar menu options in Brainshark:
    • Manage Account: This is where the user can update their profile and change their Password
    • Knowledge Base: Formerly Help and training link which still directs to our knowledge base
    • Training link has been removed

 

October 10th, 2024

Modern Authoring

  • Menu Refinements
    Tidied up the menu item naming based on user feedback.
    • Renamed several menu items for clarity and consistency. 
      • Of note
        • Slides > Add File was renamed to Slides > Import Slides 
          • to focus on the outcome
        • Slides > Add Video was given submenus 
          • to help users understand recording a video vs uploading. The upload is the same upload from Import Slides
        • Slides > Replace PowerPoint slides was renamed to Replace slides 
          • to be inclusive of Google Slides.  
        • Audio > Recording Studio was renamed to Record Audio 
          • to be more obviously parallel to Generate Audio
    • Reorganized a few menu items, namely moving things that did not fit well under existing menus under a new Tools menu 
      • Tools
        • Generate captions and notes 
          • previously on the Audio menu
        • Translate >
          • previously on the Audio menu
        • Merge slide content 
          • previously “Replace Brainshark content” on the Slides menu
        • Manage Assets 
          • previously “Assets” - the Tools menu took its place
    • Also matched the above updates under single-slide menus for consistency
      • Slide sorter’s context menus 
      • Playbar’s Slide audio menu
      • Properties Tabs’ drop-down menus
      • List view’s slide hover menus
    • Added a prominent “Add slides” menu in the middle of the empty slide when a new presentation is created to help guide users to their first step.

October 3rd, 2024

Learning

  • Bulk edit due dates for user enrollments within Administration-Ability to select one or more enrollments and edit due date.

 

September 5th, 2024

AuthoringAI

  • Pronunciation Controls
    • Pronunciation dictionary feature that allows cadmins to add phoneme or alias pronunciations to a library of pronunciation terms that will be used when generating audio with AuthoringAI voices.
    • Prompt controls that that allow you to define one-time phoneme pronunciations in slide notes
    • English only in the first release 
      • Enabling the pronunciation dictionary enables the above and disables English voices from speaking other languages.
      • Custom voices can choose whether they are using the dictionary or not
    • More details
  • Translation 2.6, Rolled out over the month
    See the internal only 2.6 tab for details of where we will be when all is complete 
    • Adding Hungarian and Vietnamese languages (and fixing Norwegian) 
    • Boosting the speed of generating audio in general by up to 33% 
    • Adding a few additional voices

Learning

  • Curriculum enrollments- Adding the ability to set due dates for courses within curriculums to match the curriculum due date for all enrollments in the curriculum.. The default will  be set at the curriculum level and editable during enrollment workflows. Setting language:  “Apply due date to associated course enrollments”. If enabled, due dates for courses within curriculums will display the curriculum due date as appropriate in my enrollments, learning reports, and in the student enrollment table
  • Bulk edit due dates for user enrollments-Adding the ability to bulk edit due dates in Administration for user enrollments

Scorecards 

  • Actions - Viewer/Headcoach are able to view Action Dashboard
  • Surfacing Advanced Coaching feedback data on the User Detail page

August 22nd, 2024

Learning

  • Scorecards email notifications and enrollment action templates
  • Course event- Enroll myself from My courses and curriculums- updated to show session selection and scheduled sessions

August 8th, 2024

Authoring

  • Large Video File Uploads 
    • Support up to 4GB
    • Displays and enforces sadmin defined site limit in upload modals

AuthoringAI

  • Translate Slides 
    With this release the core translation capability is complete. Customers can translate complete presentations, including navigation, narration, and content.
    • Supports translating: 
      • File-based Slides - created with PowerPoint, Google Slides, PDFs, Word, or Excel files.
      • Question slides - an existing feature
    • To translate the text of
      • All the slides in a presentation - use Translate Text modal. The Question Slides checkbox will be replaced with a Slide Content option.
      • Single slides - “Translate slide content” appears in the General tab of the Slide Properties panel under the overflow (...) menu along with other commands on that tab.
    • Updated and unified Brainshark presentation to share how and when to use the combination of various tools that support translation. https://www.brainshark.com/brainsharkinc/TranslationOverview
  • Custom Pronunciations - coming in August
    • Control pronunciations using
    • Pronunciation Dictionary - Cadmins can supply specific words and define how they are pronounced for all authors by using the pronunciation dictionary feature 
    • Prompts in notes - Authors can use a prompt in slide notes to force specific one-off pronunciations
    • Supports
      • English Only
      • AuthoringAI Only 
        • It does not support the Modern voice library

Learning-Course events

  • Course event reminders- Ability to send course event reminders to students who have not selected a session 
  • Course details for course events- Course sessions tab will always be shown. Description will continue to be the landing tab. Upon clicking enroll, the student will automatically be brought to the sessions tab to select a session (still optional) 
  • Course event-Enroll myself from My courses and curriculums- will direct to the existing course details modal 
  • Calendar event invitation- will pull in the location, instructor and URL(when populated)

Administration

  • Scorecards- Scorecards Action Notification template can now be used to set the default actions output message. Users will be able to modify the template in Scorecards prior to sending 
  • Learning email templates- will be shown as the default for Scorecards actions and editable prior to sending for enrollment actions. The appropriate template will be shown based on enrollment action for course, course event with or without sessions,, coaching course, or curriculum
  • Self Registration- Edit profile link will direct to the new UI for the user profile/navigation menu

Scorecards Actions

  • 40 Additional Custom fields - available to be used in Actions Input. Will require metric creation for site that requires it. 
  • Action status now shows ‘processed’ instead of ‘completed’. This was causing some customers confusion. 

Reporting/Panels

  • The release of Panel:  UsersbyView where you are able to display each Viewer / Guest book view data of a presentation without drilling in
  • Polls & Surveys - all questions can now be displayed in Scorecards. I.e. likert

 

July 10th, 2024

Authoring

  • Export Audio - The “Enable Podcast” capability in Classic has been migrated to Modern Authoring as Export Audio, and conforms to the same restrictions and behaviors as the existing feature. 

AuthoringAI

  • Improved Transcription Process - The Generate Captions and Notes feature will now work on audio shorter than :08. If the audio is shorter than :08 the “Detect Language” option is removed from the drop down and the user must choose the source language of the audio that will be transcribed. The choices are constrained to the primary language and the translation languages the customer purchased. 

Player

  • RTL Support - The Brainshark Player now supports the right to left languages of Arabic and Hebrew as well as the right to left layout for these languages. Language redirects also include Hebrew now.

Learning

  • Coaching Course and Checklist Course URLs are now auto populated and can be copied from the course overview tab
  • Manage assets for custom content type courses - Click the “Assets” button within the course overview tab to add or edit resources for students to consume. 
  • Ability to manually set points achieved-When marking a custom content type course as complete, user can now set the points achieved. This applies to custom content type courses. The total number of available points as set for the course is displayed for reference.

June 25th, 2024

  • AuthoringAI: Native Voices 2.5 
    Quarterly update and expansion of the translation support for generating audio. 
    • Expanding character limits from 5K to 10K per slide
    • Adding Hungarian and Vietnamese languages
    • Right to Left Brainshark Player support for Arabic (and in anticipation of Hebrew)
    • Key Voice improvements are:
      • Adding many new female English speaking voices
      • Including French (France) voices
      • Expanding and improving the quality of Spanish voices while removing a poor one
      • Adding new native voices to these languages.
          • Arabic AR
          • Bulgarian BG
          • Czech CS
          • Danish DA
          • Hindi HI
          • Croatian HR
          • Indonesian ID
          • Japanese JA
          • Korean KO
          • Dutch NL
          • Portuguese PT
          • Romanian RO
          • Russian RU
          • Swedish SV
          • Turkish TR
          • Ukrainian UA
          • Chinese ZH

Learning

  • Ability to copy SCORM courses
    • Bulk copy action on My Courses & Curriculums (limit of 5 still applies)
  • Search by First and Last name 
    • Enrollments-student table
    • Administration>Manage users 
  • Progress tracker order update
    • Added alpha sort as final sort if  enrollment/due date is the same
    • Also fixed an issue where order varied between first login and subsequent logins.
  • Course session calendar event Invitation (.ics)
    • Removed the course session URL from the calendar event files.

May 16th, 2024

Learning 

  • Top 5 Early adopter feedback items
    • As part of this: All new courses will now default to “Limited” enrollment based on trends and customer feedback
        • Bulk action to stop enrolling future group members: Current and future>Current use case
        • Add SCORM file name to course overview tab-Successful conversions only. Failed file names are shared in email
        • Multi-select groups in groups filter on students table-Supports multi group enrollments for current members
        • Student enrollment search now allows to search, select/add to list and continue to build enrollment list
        • Enrollment settings visibility/findability-High level settings are now visible on overview tab with access to edit which directs to enrollment settings page.
  •  

March 28th, 2024

Learning Authoring

  • Redesign of all existing enrollments workflows - Accessible from My C&C action menu

    • New Abilities include:

      • Scheduling enrollments for a future date

      • “Scheduled” toggle view for enrollments with the ability to edit or remove a scheduled enrollment

      • Remove student enrollments regardless of how they were enrolled

      • Enroll students and groups at the same time

      • Stop enrolling future members for group enrollments

      • Consistency across single/bulk actions (ex. Re-enroll groups in bulk)

      • Enrollment related settings now accessible from enrollments tab

      • Choose course session without leaving workflow

  • Course/curriculum creation and details redesign 

    • Ability to select from default/custom content types in a single selection

    • Course/curriculum details redesign - “Details” was relabeled “Overview”

    • New tab structure

    • Filters now elevated to course level - no need to go into “edit presentation”

    • Statistics moved to “Overview” tab-shows high level status for course/curriculums

    • Click to copy URLs - including for course sessions

    • Clear status indicators (active/inactive; expired messaging)

    • Modern authoring access to edit content, user can then access classic authoring

    • Ability to create/edit SCORM properties while conversion is in progress

    • Organize courses, add modules and set prerequisites dynamically

March 5th, 2024

Modern Authoring

February 29th, 2024

Modern Authoring

  • Language redirects
    • Migrating the Language part of Conditional Redirects from Classic, in anticipation of Translation. 
  •  Make a Copy
    • Adding the Copy feature from Content portal to the Overflow menu, in anticipation of Translation as you should duplicate your presentation before translating it.   

 

February 15th, 2024

Modern Authoring

Refinements

Removed the Folder menu from Slides > Add File > Brainshark Slides and Slides > Replace > Brainshark Content, to make it behave more like Merge Content in Classic.

Updated Two slide properties tab layouts: Question and Attachments, to conform to the layout/workflows of Notes and Captions

Also fixed the ability to add a Link slide attachment on this tab and in the Assets modal

 

January 23rd, 2024

Modern Authoring

Improved Guestbook Lists

Guestbook lists have been expanded to support up to 10,000 characters. 

When creating a list you can paste in a long list, separating list items with semicolons. 

When a guest encounters a list in the Guestbook, if there are more than ten items in the list, the list becomes a searchable drop down.

 

January 11th, 2024

Scorecards

Additional permission restrictions 

In turning this property on, anyone who is not a CAdmin will only see their own user data. Meaning that group managers, learning authors, etc. should have no more permissions than regular users do. 

In the client properties, if you set a property 'admin-user-access-only' to "TRUE", that will make this behavior happen. 

 

January 10th, 2024

Authoring

Improved Generate Audio

We have updated the “Generate audio from slide notes” feature in Modern Authoring with an improved UI, capabilities, and our improved "Modern" voice library. Learn more with this feature overview, which includes voice samples.
https://www.brainshark.com/brainsharkinc/GenerateAudioUpdate

Adjustable Playback Speed

Presentation authors can now allow their viewers to adjust the playback speed, with some caveats. The option to allow this is applied per presentation to give authors control. Learn more with this feature overview that explains how to enable it and lets you try it out.
https://www.brainshark.com/brainsharkinc/AdjustablePlaybackSpeed

 

 

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