1. Important changes

When you first run onCourse 9.6, it downloads all the new application resources as usual. Note that this release has a very large set of new resources totalling about 190Mb so this might take some time on slower connections. It is not expected that every future release will be this large since it incrementally just downloads changes resources.

2. Major features

onCourse now supports Java 9 and 10. You can upgrade your local installation of Java past version 8 now, although there is no need to do so until Java 8 is discontinued in 2019. Java 11 drops the webstart functionality which means you’ll need to install a client onCourse application manually after each upgrade. We’ll have a solution for that in 2019, in the meantime it will be easier if you remain on Java 10. Also note that we needed to rebuild how the attendance view in the class edit screen scrolls horizontally to work around some Java 9 issues. This will only impact you if you have a large number of sessions in a class.

We have also completely rebuilt the user interface for general preferences. There are only minor functional changes as this is our prototype of the new UI which will be progressively rolled out across the whole application. We welcome feedback on the usability of these changes.

The third major change in this release is a complete rebuild of the way the server application initialises itself. Although this isn’t a user visible change, it will help us to better fine tune server caching, memory usage and performance.

3. Reports and scripts

  • Fixed an error in the Course Completion Survey reports that makes the print process fail when one or more survey responses has a blank response. OD-11771

  • Fixed an error where the Cancelled Class report was including records that should be suppressed. The report data was correct, but the total was including values from cancelled classes and running classes, where it should have been cancelled classes only. OD-11796

  • Fixed the plain text version of the Tax Invoice report to show the missing Discount column. OD-11889

  • Updated Smart and Skilled (NSW) export flavour to reflect recent changes around reporting requirements. Please refer to Smart and Skilled update 64 for more information. OD-11982

4. Minor features

  • Added the ability to duplicate data collection forms. OD-10821

  • Custom fields created in onCourse Preferences can now be manually sorted by dragging and dropping them on the page. OD-11017

  • Added Data Collection rules for payer and parent. You can now create separate rules for collecting data from people who are the allocated payer or the parent on an online enrolment. OD-11918

  • New import CSV 'onCourse contact update subscriptions CSV import' added to onCourse. Lets you set marketing flags for contacts via CSV import.

5. Fixes

  • onCourse ish blog entries are again shown in the Help menu in the nav bar - Help > onCourse News OD-11127

  • Fixed an issue where the transfer process was not applying contra payments as expected. OD-11844

  • Fixed an issue where the application could lock up when clicking 'next' in class edit view on the Budget tab. OD-11882

  • 'Vouchers' are now a printable entity, meaning they can be printed as a report. OD-11890

  • Amended some logic in the AVETMISS export window that showed an override checkbox without context. OD-11903

  • Fixed an error where you couldn’t duplicate and reverse an invoice with an attached payment plan. OD-11922

  • Contacts: The 'Custom fields' tab will now show in red when an error exists within a mandatory custom field. OD-11926

  • Fixed an error that caused the 'alert students of related class' script to send to students who were already enrolled. OD-11934

  • Updated override information that displays for AVETMISS export flavour formats STSOnline and SA. OD-11946

  • Fixed an error in the Survey Report caused when every survey related to one of the selected classes has one or more scores set to equal 0. OD-11947

  • Fixed an AVETMISS 8 error where NAT00080 'Client Name for Encryption' was incorrectly set for single name students. OD-11950

6. Web features

  • Changing the class hiding date will now change search results. That is, if you set classes to disappear from the website 5 days before they finish, that should change which courses are found in a search. OD-10279

  • 301 redirects now work with query string parameters (for example a URL like "/about-us?source=mail" is now redirected the same way as just "/about-us"). OD-11923

  • Kiosk now displays the tutor for a session where that tutor is different to the default for the class. OD-11902

  • Remove the tutor page from the website when the tutor’s employment termination date in the past. OD-11760

  • You can now choose to show the price for classes that are set to 'Enrol by Application'. OD-11708

7. Web fixes

  • Fixed an issue where "Near" courses searched sorts results incorrectly. We were assigning sort weight by distance in the wrong units which threw off some of the results. OD-11920

  • Fixed an issue where searching for "after date before today" by URL query threw an error. You can use a URL like /courses?after=20180820 but previously that would only work if the date was in the future. OD-11842