Haiku Learning Blog

If you’ve been using the web a while, you’ve likely spent a ton of energy setting up your classroom website or online course, or if you’re in IT then supporting various systems. We hear and understand that you don’t want to redo all that good work, so now you can bring your work with you into Haiku LMS!

Newest Additions to Haiku LMS

• Common Cartridge Imports: If you’re already using an LMS then you know what it took to enter and organize all your curriculum data. Haiku LMS is Common Cartridge (IMS) compliant, and if your current LMS (e.g. Blackboard and Moodle) is, too, then you can bring your data along when you make the switch to Haiku.
  Watch the video tutorial
• Mini Sites: If you’ve created lesson plans in third-party tools like Softchalk, you can use Haiku’s content blocks to upload their HTML files into your Haiku class! You can even upload small apps that span several files from your Computer Science classes, such as Java applets.
  Watch the video tutorial
• Randomized Multiple Choice: Want to make sure students are really thinking about the question and the right answer and are not just multiple-guessing? When you create assessments, set multiple choice responses to randomize so that they’re in a different order each time a student sees them.

Thanks to our current Haiku LMS teachers and Twitter followers who provided input for these features! We’re confident they’ll be used well and are excited to see the creativity that they enable!

Last week Haiku launched an exciting new feature – exciting, that is – if you are a system administrator for a large school or district.

If you are one of our system administrators or considering bringing Haiku LMS into your district, read on!

Previously, Haiku supported “Differential Imports,” and the process, although simple to implement for our users, required the upload of a complete data set in order for Haiku to know what to update.

This meant that schools and districts had to upload every single class…every single user…every single roster entry (you get the idea) every time the system administrator did an import. This process worked well for small schools pulling information out of a single system, but as Haiku LMS’s user base grew, so did the size of the imports Haiku’s larger districts were uploading to Haiku LMS.

This need became particularly acute when one or two records needed to be changed out of hundreds of thousands of records.  You can see the need pretty clearly by now, I am sure.

Thus, our most recent release added a new tool for our school system administrators.

The new feature, named “Partial Imports,” enables schools and districts to upload only data that has changed.  Setting it up is simple – it looks almost exactly the same as the “Differential Imports” currently being used.  The key difference is that a separate file is used if the school or district wishes to delete or disable entries.

If you are a Haiku system administrator and are interested in knowing more about this new type of import, please contact Bryan Falcon at bryanf@haikulearning.com.

Special thanks to Saddleback Valley Unified School District (California) and Ocean Springs School District (Mississippi) for their support and feedback in bringing about this latest new enhancement!