Back to school is almost upon us and the Edlink engineering team has been hard at work. Here’s a preview of some of the amazing new things you can expect us to ship in the next 12 weeks!
This is a long one, so here's a TL;DR and some quick links to each section:
- Embedded Administrator Onboarding Flow
- Access and Download Files from the LMS
- Support for Rubrics
- Revamped Infinite Campus Integration for Extended Data
- Brand New Troubleshooting Tools
- Google Classroom Add-on Support
- New and Improved AI Chatbot
- Updating Permissions & Data Sharing Options
- Reworking Data Validation Reports
- Brand New Integrations
- Developer Cookbooks
- Improving our AI Transformation Tools
- Automatic CSV Parsing With AI
Embedded Administrator Onboarding Flow
We're excited to announce our upcoming embedded onboarding flows. You'll soon be able to embed the Edlink onboarding experience into your application. Administrators can get their LMS or SIS connected entirely within your product.
In addition, you'll be able to further customize the look and feel of the onboarding flow, including setting your own colors and logo (replacing ours).
Access and Download Files from the LMS
With the rise of generative AI, we've been building out some new API endpoints to access deeper information stored in the LMS. The first set of endpoints will be to list & download files that are associated with a particular course. These new file endpoints can be leveraged by AI companies looking to generate new content or provide additional context for their chatbots.
We're also updating our endpoints to download submission files to improve the developer experience when working with files in the LMS (these are non-breaking changes).
Support for Rubrics
Rubrics are another frequently requested item here at Edlink. We're planning to add support for assignment rubrics before back to school this year. What you can expect is the ability to read rubric criteria and submit specific point values for each row when grading student work.
Revamped Infinite Campus Integration for Extended Data
We're neck deep in an overhaul of our Infinite Campus sync. Previously, our sync was powered by the OneRoster 1.2 API, but the OneRoster specification doesn't capture the types of data that our clients have come to expect. Given that it's the second most popular SIS in the United States, it was past time that we gave it another shot.
We're rewriting the integration from scratch to provide our clients better support for extended data (e.g. demographics, detailed contacts), historical data, and eventually, attendance.
Brand New Troubleshooting Tools
Troubleshooting issues remains a constant challenge when scaling your integrations. Our API Logging and Dashboard tools are helpful, but still don't capture (and explain) the full array of possibilities that can go wrong. To that end, we're planning to release some additional troubleshooting tools for your team to get issues resolved quickly (and without escalating to engineering).
The first three tools on the list are:
- Login tracing to help you uncover the root cause of SSO issues.
- Sharing rules debugging tool to help you figure out why certain data is shared (or not shared) with your application.
- AI powered error log explanations to help you fix issues more quickly.
Google Classroom Add-on Support
Add-ons are a cool new feature released by the Google team to improve content workflows in Google Classroom. In the coming months, you'll be able to enable add-on support for your application via Edlink.
New and Improved AI Chatbot
We first released Eddie Lynx (our AI bot) back in 2022. Since then, AI models have come a long way! Keep an eye out for our new and improved Eddie Lynx. He'll have even more knowledge about our product (and yours) and can provide answers with a LOT more context than before. Finally, you'll be able to revisit your old chats to pick up where you left off.
Updating Permissions & Data Sharing Options
API permissions and sharing are one of the more confusing parts of our platform. We're rethinking how permissions are structured to make everything a little more user-friendly.
In addition, we're planning to add some features into the Dashboard to help your team understand why data is the way it is when it comes from Edlink. Not every LMS or SIS is equivalent and these tools should make it much easier to understand what data is available (and why).
Reworking Data Validation Reports
We're changing up the way our data validation feature works to automatically generate reports based on a general set of rules (instead of requiring that developers set up their own custom rules). We believe that this change will make the feature more more usable and provide more concrete actions for schools to correct missing or incomplete data.
Brand New Integrations
One of our goals as an organization is to help your team say "yes" to whatever a school throws your way. We're planning to release even more integrations to our supported systems. The exact list of new systems isn't public yet, but you can keep an eye out for changes in our Changelog.
Developer Cookbooks
"How do I do X with Edlink?" is a pretty common question we get from developers. To that end, we're launching a new section of our documentation called the "Cookbook", which will provide step-by-step guides to help developers work through common use cases.
These cookbooks will not only highlight areas of the Edlink platform that you might not be aware of; they'll also give your team a head start on implementation (and hopefully shorten implementation timelines).
Improving our AI Transformation Tools
AI transformation is getting an overhaul to help you get more done:
- We're reworking the prompt to include way more information about Edlink and the dataset to increase the accuracy of transformations.
- We're making sure that the AI transformation tool uses the latest and greatest code generation models.
- You'll be able to manually edit the transformation code afterwards, as well as reuse it with other integrations.
Automatic CSV Parsing With AI
One of the most painful parts of Edlink is uploading custom CSV files (e.g. files that do not follow a specific format like OneRoster). Because you can upload completely arbitrary files into our system, we need to have a pretty sophisticated mapping tool to import data in our standardized format.
With the help of AI, this can be done in just a few seconds.
Wrapping It Up
All in all, we're very excited for what's coming down the pipeline at Edlink this summer. If you want to follow along as things get released, you can find more details information on our Changelog.
As always, if you want to learn more about the Edlink platform, please don't hesitate to reach out!
