New features, improvements and bug fixes released on Riipen from July 19 - Aug 2.

Today's update spans the last two weeks and includes some major new features requested by our users: the ability to save searches, link to an external calendar, and track hours spent on projects.

Feature

• Saved searches - a user can save any search criteria in the project or experience marketplace to quickly apply it again in future and be notified of new content matching your search. Learn more

• Calendar integration - all users now have a calendar showing the times of key events related to their account. Sync your Riipen calendar to an external calendar with your unique calendar link.
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• Work logs - learners can now log their time spent on projects, via the team page. These logs can be reviewed by the employer they work with, and their educator. Learn more

Improvements

• As an employer, when you duplicate a project, you can now duplicate both its content and its meta-information, if you are an administrator of the project. Previously only content could be duplicated.

• As an educator or employer, if you have recommendations enabled you'll receive recommendations based on your saved searches and recent searches.

• The chatbot message "Still interested in this possible match?" which sends in match request conversations has been updated to prompt more specific action, suggesting the users book a meeting.

• As an educator, I can indicate in the experience wizard "Projects wanted" section what percentage of projects I intend to source from open marketplace versus my portal's private marketplace.
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• Substantial load time improvements for all portal reports
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• As a user, I should receive a chatbot reminder in a match request conversation 5 days before match request expiry
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• The project review email received by employers after project publication now has a section explaining the content is generated with AI, with a link to a help article.

Bug fixes

• In the message preview component on match, match request and team page, the last message sent should be shown instead of first message sent.
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• Validation error when submitting match request with milestones

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New features, improvements and bug fixes released on Riipen from July 5 - 19.

Feature

• All projects published on Riipen are automatically reviewed using a custom implementation of OpenAI. Employers receive an email after project publication letting them know how their project scores on three main factors, and prompting edits as needed.

• A project can now be tagged with a "Cause" from the list of UN Sustainable Development Goals. Once we have a critical mass of tagged projects, this will come a filter users can access in the project marketplace.

Improvements

• Where currency is selected in the experience wizard or match request wizard, a user can now select from AUD, GBP and EUR in addition to the existing options of CAD and USD.

• 'View all' button on experience recommendations now links to the user's preferred marketplace

• Error messages on form submissions are now listed in a section at the top of the form, to allow us to list even errors that don't appear directly on the page.

• As an educator or employer, I should be able to filter projects/experiences in the marketplace by ones that don't accept my location

• As a user, by default I should only see projects/experiences accepting my portal/company’s location in the marketplace

• Conversations in the inbox can now be filtered by request state

• Project resources are now editable directly in the project resources tab, not in the project wizard.

• Industries and Number of Employees are now required fields in the project wizard, to improve our ability to match projects with experiences.

• Paid experiences can now indicate if payment is provided by the employer, an external funder, or both.

• A portal can now set its platform language and its preferred marketplace content language filter independently.

New features, improvements and bug fixes released on Riipen from June 28 - July 5

Feature

• The new Achievements feature launched on June 30. This feature gamifies the Riipen platform for users, allowing you to earn recognition in the form of achievements for different types of actions on the platform - not only for feedback. Users with past activity got a head start and had achievements issued to them at launch, and will continue to earn new ones from here on out.

• Portals can also create their own achievements unique to their learners, educators, and employers. Learn more.

Improvements

• Update to the automated reminders and event activity that is shown within a conversation, to make these very distinct from user-initiated messages.

• Add "What to expect" section to project draft reminder email to help new employers understand their first steps.

• Add marketplace language setting to Portal Settings > General. This allows a portal to set a main language for their platform (English or French) and select one or more languages by which to filter the marketplace.

• Application due date field should be optional in match request wizard and match revision page

Bug fixes

• Match Request preview titles can overflow page on some screen sizes

• Experience > Matches table showing incorrect teams count

• Department tag in experience wizard will not allow to you remove the tag

New features, improvements and bug fixes released on Riipen from June 21-28

Improvements

• The main category selection dropdown in the project wizard and experience wizard is now searchable.

• As an educator, I can now edit experience dates and the date controller via the experience settings, rather than going via the wizard.

• As an employer who's not yet a member of a company, I now get a warning at the beginning of the project wizard that I will not be able to publish my project until I create or join a company. The user can still create a draft.

• As an educator, I should see a Teams tab on the experience showing the progress of all teams. Under the Learners tab of an experience, the educator has a "Teams" tab where they can see the progress of all teams.

• A draft project or experience should have a clear call to action for the viewer to edit & publish their content.

• Project wizard fields now have minimum lengths

• Department name capitalization should be preserved in portal nametag

Bug fixes

• Project template owner type filter resets back to All when selecting an option

New features, improvements and bug fixes released on Riipen from June 14-21.

Improvements

• Feedback display update: feedback cards have been updated to have more visual appeal and provide more relevant information about what the user was giving feedback on. These updates cards can be seen on user, company and portal profiles.
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• Company size is now asked on the project wizard "company" step
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• Company size is now editable in the company profile
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• Company size is now a dropdown of pre-selected ranges so it's easier for employers to provide
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• As an employer, I now receive a single email with feedback reminders per match, instead of being reminded individually for each team.
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• Experience settings > Team creation section has had a text update for clarity
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• Marketplace links have been renamed for clarity. Marketplaces are now named more specifically as "Open experiences," "Open projects", "Portal experiences" or "Portal projects."
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• The progress cell of the Teams table is now a link to the team page.

Bug fixes

• A user would sometimes see their own sent message in the "unread message" email notification, although they were being notified about an unread message from the other party. This is now fixed.

New features, improvements and bug fixes released on Riipen from June 7-14.

Features

• As an educator, you can create a custom project template and link it to your experience. This option is accessible through the settings tab. Employers viewing your experience will be able to submit a project using your pre-approved template, to ensure a higher quality of project submission. Learn more.

Improvements

• The star rating component has been updated everywhere so that it's always used consistently with 5 stars shown and then the number of ratings included in that average.

• The appearance of categories and industries on the user and company profile has been updated to look better and be more consistent with how they're displayed elsewhere.

• The image upload modal closes automatically on completion rather than requiring the user to click Confirm.

• If a user adds more than 10 options to a multiple choice question, these will now appear in a dropdown menu to the respondent.

• Category dropdown menus are now ordered alphabetically

• Portal > Learners now has a feedback column that is sortable

• A learner can't complete milestones or the submission until the project is started.

Bug fixes

• Issue where match request questions would give "Question has already been taken" error has been resolved.

• Certain teams could not be deleted as they showed as having a self reflection, which was incorrectly associated with that team. The underlying data issue has been fixed so that all teams without submissions or feedback can now be deleted.

In the last week, we rolled out several improvements and bug fixes. A major new feature is coming very soon, and will have a separate release post when it is live: educators will be able to link project templates to their experience for employers to apply with.

Improvements

• The mobile dropdown menu is no longer cut off on devices with screen widths smaller than 384px

• A separate column has been added for feedback in the Portal > Learners table

• Any user can now unsubscribe from member request emails

• The member detail view for educators to view learners now shows the user's primary email address and its confirmation status

• The customizable logo that portal admins can add to the nav bar on their portal's subdomain is now 40px high (up from 30px) and has a variable width up to 161px to make it easier to accommodate different logos.

• The landing page for app.riipen.com (log out to view) has an updated UI with new "cards" describing each section

• As a company admin, I now receive a dedicated email when an educator proposes a project to my company.

• Recommendations are now ordered by recommendation score and then by the date at which they were updated, in order to surface more recent content to users.

Bug fixes

• Selecting a search project filter and refreshing page makes search filters disappear on mobile view

• User unable to proceed in match request wizard due to missing data that wasn't shown to user

• Unable to accept match request due to missing data that wasn't shown to user

In the last week, we rolled out one very exciting new feature, and several small improvements.

Features

• Employers can now create projects with an assist from AI. When creating a project, employers can now choose to create from scratch, use a template, or use AI. After writing a prompt, the artificial intelligence engine will take into account the company information on Riipen and Riipen's project best practices to produce project content based on that prompt. The employer will review and edit the auto-generated project before publishing. Learn more
  

Improvements

• The learner view of the experiences table is now sorted more intuitively, with later-starting experiences shown at the top of the table.

• The Teams table for learners now has only the team name hyperlinked, to address some comments made by learners in feedback sessions that it was confusing to have 3 options within the table
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• The Portal > Learners table is now sorted by most recently created to least recently

• The text on the milestone submission page has been customized to be distinct from the final submission page to add more clarity for learners.

• The email an employer receives alerting them of a new match request now includes the experience name.
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Bug fix
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• Issue where team could not be deleted has been resolved

• The email reminding employers who sign up and don't create or join a company was not sending; this is now fixed.

• The application due date was appearing erroneously in the match request wizard; this is now fixed and displays only when the match sets the dates and applications are required.

In the last week, here are the main user-facing improvements and issues addressed in the Riipen platform. Stay tuned for some bigger news to come soon: the team is working on three larger features (linked project templates, saved searches, and one surprise feature) to be released in the coming weeks.
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Improvements

• Experience meta information "general" section now includes team size and student years

• The progress bar and the dates in the "Teams" table progress column now reflect the actual dates and progress of the team, not the scheduled dates, when progress exists.

• When filters are applied in an advanced filters modal, the filter icon displays the number of filters that are applied but currently hidden

• The email an employer receives alerting them of a new match request now includes the experience name.
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Bug fix
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• Uploads could time out for submissions with too many files. To address this we have for now put on a maximum of 10 images per project, 10 resource files per project, and 10 files per milestone or final submission, which addresses 95% of use cases. We are exploring other options to increase these limits in the future.
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• For users of our Zapier app, The match request created trigger was missing information about the request sender and recipient. This is now updated.

Since the launch of Riipen 2.0 on April 20, we've been busy working on early user feedback, plus some planned enhancements. Below are some of the highlight items implemented in Riipen since April 20.
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Improvements

• As an educator, I can now invite a learner directly to a team without needing to first invite them to the experience. This is available through the Team > Members tab.

• Adding an educator as a member to an experience adds them to the portal as a guest (view-only) member.

• Adding an employer as a member to a project adds them to the company as a guest (view-only) member.

• An experience now shows the number of matched project spots remaining in the header of the page if that number is <5

• The experience page meta information shows the number of matches made out of the total matches wanted.

• A user can change their primary email address linked to their account. This is available in User Settings.

• The Portal > Educators page now has keyword search to easily find educators by name.

• The member request page shows the requester's primary email address to help administrator's assess whether to accept the request.

• The feedback button on the team page has been made more prominent to employers, displaying on the submission itself.

• A user invited to a new portal/company is on that portal/company when they accept the invitation.
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Features
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• As an educator, when creating teams in the learner invite wizard, I can select learners from a dropdown menu if they are already in the experience.

• As an educator and employer, I can negotiate compensation in the match request process if the experience requires compensation.
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Bug fix
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• The "send" button on messages was not displaying when the user had an adblocker enabled. This has been resolved.