a year ago
Onboarding 2.0 Launch
Hey everyone! We are excited to announce that we have completely revamped the onboarding experience. We are currently considering the new onboarding experience a beta, so please make SmarterServices aware of any issues you encounter. We will move everyone over to the new onboarding experience by the end of 2022, but for now you can opt into the beta by discussing with your CSM.
Please see the below video for a comprehensive walkthrough of the new onboarding experience, and also read through the change log below.
Change Log
New Features
- After the SmarterProctoring extension has been installed, students will automatically be redirected back to onboarding from the Chrome Web Store. This alleviates the need for students to bring onboarding back into focus by manually clicking on the onboarding tab.
- When a session is ended, all browsing data (cookies, cache, etc) will be cleared from the time they started their session to the end of their session. This will prevent a student from accessing the test after the proctoring session is complete.
- A second Chrome tab containing information and tools related to the student's session is created after extension installation. This tab named the SessionUI provides students with an area to review details for their exam session, instructor-provided attachments, and access to the virtual calculator.
- Students have the ability to show or hide their webcam view while in the session. This will allow the student to verify they are properly framed within the camera’s view in case the camera is moved or if the student physically repositions themselves.
Enhancements to Existing Features
- Automatic and manual password injection reliability has been improved.
- Proper supported browser and device checking at the start of onboarding. In the old version of onboarding, it was possible to start using an unsupported browser or device only to hit a dead end without proper information on what the problem was and how to resolve it.
- A vast reduction of the complexity required to enable the required Google Chrome camera, microphone, images, and pop-up permissions. In the old version of onboarding, if these permissions were not set correctly, students had to navigate through several menus within Chrome to enable them. With this release, students will be able to enable all required Chrome permissions by clicking a single button during onboarding.
- The general stability and reliability of onboarding has been greatly improved. A special focus on improving the reliability of the screen-sharing step of onboarding has been made for this release.
- The overall layout and design of onboarding has been redesigned in order to increase the clarity of the entire proctoring experience.
- The “disable extensions" lockdown modality option is now enabled on every Auto/Hybrid session and instructors will no longer see “disable extensions” as a selectable modality option when creating or editing Auto/Hybrid exams. Specific 3rd party extensions have been known to prevent students from successfully completing onboarding. Extensions that are disabled during onboarding will be re-enabled when the student ends their session. The extensions that are disabled during onboarding are:
- Teleparty
- ProctorU
- HonorLock
- Proctorio
- Proctor360
- Examity
- LastPass
- Any extensions with
password
contained within the name AND/OR the description.
- The proctoring menu has been completely redesigned. The old menu contained text-only buttons placed at the top of the user's browser window. The new menu is a vertical menu containing easy-to-identify visual icons and descriptive text.
- Improved clarity in the instructions and operational flow of Automated Proctoring ID verification.
- Attachments are now accessible through the proctoring menu. Previously, students had to access attachments by navigating the extension menu. The new functionality as part of this update provides easy access to attachments as well as the ability to access attachments when the “full screen” modality option has been enabled for the exam configuration.
- Resolved issue where students could get into an endless loop under certain circumstances while onboarding.
Changes to Previous Functionality
- If a student wishes to abandon onboarding before it is completed, they can do so by closing the sessionUI tab or the onboarding UI tab. A notification will appear that informs the student that the session has ended because one or both of the tabs have been closed.
- Onboarding video step has been removed as it did not align with the use case for several customers and was more confusing to users than helpful.
- "Disable new tabs" and "close open tabs" are now merged together as one lockdown modality option.
- Speed check is now enforcing a 5 Mbps up/down connection. Students will not be able to proceed if they do not meet these levels.
- The lime green border around the browser window while in a testing session has been removed. The browser border was misleading since we were recording the entire screen, the border communicated we were only recording the browser content. The new proctor menu is now the sole indicator if the user is in a session or not.