We are excited to announce the August 2020 quarterly release of Frost! This update brings us closer to our goal of creating an integrated ecosystem of products that serve every facet of education technology. This release also brings several significant capability improvements based on customer feedback. Here is a full list of the updates:
Frost Standards Manager (ACMT)
Taxonomy Performance Improvements
Standards Manager now supports importing and exporting large taxonomies with 20,000 or more nodes. Users can now run an import in the background while continuing to interact with the Standards Manager. Users will also receive an email when an export is complete, so they can continue other tasks while it runs in the background.
Public Taxonomy Improvements
We’ve vastly improved the experience for a non-registered user to be able to access and view a taxonomy that has been made public. Non-registered users can now search for published taxonomies, filter taxonomies, and view them in various formats.
Math Equations in Taxonomies
Standards Manager now supports adding Latex math equations to a node. These can be imported or exported as a CSV, JSON, or API.
Taxonomy “Coverage” Report
Users needed a way to view alignment gaps when aligning nodes from one taxonomy to nodes in another taxonomy. Users now have the ability to generate a report and export it to PDF/EXCEL. This report shows them the alignment gaps between any two taxonomies.
Taxonomy Versions
Taxonomies are living documents that frequently change, especially when they are aligned to standards and competencies. Our users needed a way to keep track of past versions of taxonomies when updating. We’ve added notifications as well, so any linked system of a taxonomy will be notified when a new version is published.
Help Guide
We have added extensive in-app help guides to Frost Standards Manager. Users can now access a help section that gives detailed step-by-step guides on how to use the various features of Standard Manager.
Frost Designer
LTI Export
One of the core reasons people use Frost is its ability to integrate with multiple learning management systems. Because of this, we’re constantly adding new learning management systems to our growing list of ones we support. In this update, we’ve included D2L (Brightspace) LMS to our list. Users can now create a course in Frost designer and export it as an LTI package to D2L.
Centrally Managed Assessments
Assessments that are saved in the Learning Object Repository can now be delivered and played in any Frost supported LMS, using Frost’s LTI-based assessment player. This gives users much more control over the assessment experience, while additionally helping them centrally manage their assessment portfolio.
Teacher-Editable Courses
This update gives teachers and other educators the ability to append notes, ideas, and other information to pages in Canvas, without compromising the core content. An instructional designer is now able to designate specific pages within Canvas as “editable,” which gives other users the ability to append and add to it.
Rubric Support
Rubrics can now be defined and managed centrally from Frost. Courses exported as a BB Ultra package will include the Rubric detailed if aligned.
Course Composition Report
This feature gives a course designer the ability to view a report that shows what types of learning objects were used to compose a course.This report will show a percentage of usage of learning objects such as external links, external tools, videos, images, illustrations, quizzes, assignments, interactive elements, and more.
Bulk Ingestion of Content
This update allows users to upload all of their assets from an existing, supported LMS into the Learning Object Repository. During the upload, users will be able to append metadata and have that metadata transfer into the LOR.
Support of Kaltura in LOR & Course Editor
Videos created and managed in Kaltura can be added as references the LOR. These references can be searched and used in courses.
QuAD
Graph Template
Our customers needed a way to implement graphing into the assessments. This feature now allows course designers to create questions that are visual and graphical in nature, and have students answer these questions by plotting objects on the Cartesian plan/Graphing area.
Publish Process Improvements
Publishing an assessment can now run as a background process so users can continue to work and interact with the tool.
Unified Product Suite – Central Role Management
We’re bringing Frost and QuAD closer together through centralized role management. With this update, user permissions and roles can be defined centrally and applied to both Frost and QuAD. Users can also now seamlessly switch between Frost and QuAD.