Changelog

Admins and Teachers can now assign Spaces to Students. This allows you to place a Space on a Student's dashboard without them needing to join the Space before showing up.

You can now blur your video background for a bit of extra privacy (or if you've got a messy room). You can find the toggle in the Comms Dock Settings, just underneath Advanced Noise Cancelling.

Documents now include more options in the toolbar, like font style, lists, and colours. You can also now upload images to a Document.

The much-anticipated Resource Library is now available for everyone! Organisations and individuals can now upload their own resources to be available directly from the Resource Drawer in their Spaces.

Session recording playback has been completely rebuilt from the ground up. Initial loading, jumping and scrubbing along the timeline should all be markedly faster and the playback environment is now themed according to your organisation's branding settings.

The dashboard has had a new coat of paint applied and some performance improvements under the hood so you should see faster load times as well as a fresh new design on each page!

Meta

We started this change log where you can track major (and some minor) updates to Lessonspace every month :)

Spaces

Features

The Emoji Launcher is now available on mobile. It can be accessed via the Chat tab by clicking the emoji next to the send button. The Emoji Launcher also received a slight cosmetic update on desktop.

Updates

Users who join a Space without giving permission to their browser to access their webcam and microphone will now be able to see and hear other people in the Space who have published their video and audio feeds. This allows users who do not have a webcam or microphone at all to join and see and hear everyone else publishing their video and audio feeds in the Space.

Added a warning to the top of the window when the size of the Space starts getting too big. This is rare, but when a Space has lots of tabs, or has a tab with a lot of drawings/text on it, this takes up a lot of memory. If the Space gets too big, it can become slow, unstable, or even crash. This warning will let users know when a Space is reaching its capacity and prompts them to delete some unused content to free up some space.

Bug Fixes

Fixed a bug that caused everyone to get muted when the Leader of a Space muted another participant.

Dashboard

Features

Added the ability to export data from the Overview and Session pages as CSV.

Settings pages received a new coat of paint and some minor layout adjustments to make navigating them a little easier. Expect this new aesthetic to roll out over the other pages in the dashboard in the near future.

Bug Fixes

Fixed an issue with a billing alert being displayed when it shouldn’t have been.

Integrations

Updates

Updated our documentation with some additional explanation on different terms as well as adding more clarity to management API authentication.

We made the error messages when an integration attempt with TutorCruncher fails clearer and more informative.

Spaces

Features

We've launched the Floating Menu on the Whiteboard module which adds some new editing functionality to objects, and reveals the functions that were previously hidden in the right-click (or long-press on touch devices) context menu. This should make it much easier to manipulate objects on tablets and phones especially.

Here are some of the highlights:

• You can now edit the colours of objects (shapes, text, lines etc.). For shapes you can change both the outline and the fill colours independently.
• You can now simply click the Lock button to lock or unlock the selected object. Locking an object prevents it from being moved, scaled, rotated, or deleted.
• You can use the Duplicate button to make a copy of the selected object.
• You can easily re-arrange your objects by using the Bring Forward or Send Backwards buttons.
• When selecting a graph or equation generated by the Equation Tool, you can click the Edit Equation button to open up the editor. Double-clicking them still works though, if you're used to that!

One caveat to be aware of is that Floating Menu currently only works on single-item selections. It will not show when selecting more than one object at a time. We plan to support this in the future.

Updates

Improved the performance of uploading images to a Space. If an image fails to upload for any reason (due to a poor connection, packet loss, etc.) it will be automatically retried several times before failing completely.

Bug Fixes

Fixed a bug where the UI would jump around when you open or typed in the chat on mobile devices.

Dashboard

Features

You can now customise your billing details on your Lessonspace invoices under the Billing tab on the Settings page.

On the Sessions page you can now filter results to show only sessions that are currently in progress.

Bug Fixes

Fixed a bug with Space Settings not updating or reverting to defaults correctly.

Meta

We made #5 Product of the Day on ProductHunt on Saturday. We were hunted out of the blue by none other than #1 Product Hunter and the literal inventor of the hashtag, Chris Messina. Needless to say, being a Saturday, we were not prepared, but it was a nice surprise. You can check out the post here: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/lessonspace

Spaces

Features

You are now able to change language inside of Spaces thanks to the new Language Selector. See it in action:

Pro and Advanced customers will still be able to set the default language of their spaces, but now language will also be automatically adjusted to match the user's browser settings if their preferred language is supported.

At the moment we support English, French (Canadian), Italian and Polish. We are working on adding new languages soon. If you'd like to request a specific language or contribute, please let us know via support@thelessonspace.com.

Updates

To coincide with the new language selector, our hotkey hints got a little upgrade to make them more language-agnostic.

Dashboard

Features

Our Moodle plugin was approved for Beta access. If you're a Moodle user, try it out and let us know what you think: https://moodle.org/plugins/mod_lessonspace. Version 1.0 will be live soon!

Updates

We've updated our Developer Documentation with a new look and clarified some of the explanations. We're working on some more improvements to make it even easier to integrate. We'd like to keep improving this documentation all the time so feel free to send us any suggestions you may have.

We added the ability to disconnect from integrations and connect to new ones seamlessly. Previously this was something you'd have to request us to do, so it's a lot faster!

Meta

This edition of the Lessonspace changelog was a bit delayed because we were busy finishing up one of the biggest and most anticipated updates ever: Video Layout Modes. Read more about it below.

Spaces

Features

Video Layout Modes are here! Now, in addition to the original Floating Video Mode, you have 3 additional layout modes to choose from:

• Sidebar Mode: the new default mode that stacks videos neatly to the side of the workspace. No more fiddling around with the size of videos to see the content!
• Grid Mode: the standard layout you'd be familiar with from other video conferencing tools is now available in your Spaces, for when the content on the page is less important.
• Present Mode: when you need to bring attention to a particular person's webcam feed or shared screen, double-click (or double-tap) it to open it up nice and big, with all the other videos shrinking to the side or the bottom.

When you activate Leading Mode, all participants will change layout with you, so you can direct their focus as needed. If you share your screen while leading, your feed will automatically be presented to everyone else. Deactivating Leading Mode will switch everyone back to their original chosen layout.

For a more thorough breakdown, check out this video:

Hot on the heels of this release is the highly-requested ability to share your screen and webcam feed at the same time. It should be out soon so keep your eyes peeled.

Updates

Along with Video Layout Modes come a lot of visual and layout improvements. The Comms Dock is now docked to the right-hand side of the screen, and the Chat window got a facelift and now opens up in its own area, no longer covering videos.

Floating Menu will now show up on right-click as well as left-click to better mimic how the old context menu used to show up on Whiteboard tabs.