GW Notes

1. One school had a nice idea which is worth passing on to all - if you go to Print Lists / Individual Student forms you will find a new process whereby you can print all of their TEC Gateway results forms in one go.

1.Two schools reported a problem losing standards attached to students. One reported losing results as well. Course standards will automatically be removed from a student if they are found to already have that standard on another course, as students cannot take the same standard twice. If you enter results on a student then go to another student and then back again then it LOOKS as though thwe results have disappeared - as the course is no longer displayed. This is compounded by a blue highlight on the first course so that it LOOKS as though it is selected. I've now changed all that!

There is now a new button just about the students display of standards attached to a course. Clicking this button will cause any standards NOT attached to the course in question to be removed and all standards which ARE attached to thecourse to be reattached if they are missing.

I'd like to add an auto-update of results (from MUSAC or Kamar) to this process but I haven't done thet yet.

1. If you wish to print a document for each of the employers then you can now do that. The document design should include only employer details as it will not be printed per student. When you go to print you can now select for either students or

1. When printing the 'Student standards result summary' you now have the choice of including just those standards attached to the placement selection or of ALL standards achieved by the student in question.

1. Three new fields have been added to those you can include in user-designed documents. The first is the 'Placement Outcome Code'. The other two are empty tick boxes - one aligned to the left of the page and the other to the right. These enable you to generate placment- or student -specific questionnaires.

1. A warning to Kamar users about the date of the last worsfold export has been added to the main screen.

1. Placement 'Day' has been added to the list of fields which can be included in user defined lists and documents.

1. A change has been made to the photograph display routine so that photographs are automatically resized to fit the viewer frame. (The actual photograph files are not adjusted - just the display process)

2. A new column has been added to the Pre-designed list for 'Placements and their details' to now include the date and time of the placement.

1. The same school then reported that achievement standard results where not appearing on other documents either - and I found many places that they were not being reported.

2. The small pull-down menu which appear to the left of the 'employer' selector when adding a NEW placement was not working. It is now, and enables you to select just one area of employer categories from which to choose.

1. This version includes a minor change for one school - who spotted that achievement standard results were not being counted in the achievement summary.

1. I recently received a call from the TEC asking that I modify the various TEC forms as several small changes had been made to their forms. These changes have now been made.

2. A fault was discovered in the 'Global Update from MUSAC' process under utilities which caused the program to crash rather than to perform the update. This has also been repaired.

This is a non-essential update. I've had several requests lately so I've put them together as version 1.7.6.

1. Recently added is the ability to select a photograph file name based on students' names. There are about 20 new possibilities! The last four add the letters 'PC' in front of the numerical codes - which are used by some schools.

2. One school reported that the achievement summary was duplicating standards where a student had been allocated to a course and then removed from it and then added back again and so on. Dulicates are now automatically removed.

3. Under Pre-designed lists the list titled 'Placement Details' (bottom of the left hand side) has now had 'Start date' added to the display.

1. I've had several requests lately for the new TEC form titled 'Gateway Unit Results' to be added to the package. It is now there and is the fourth TEC form available for printing once you have selected a student's placement and clicked on the blue 'Forms signed' pullout in the top right hand corner of the student's placement screen. You also have the option whether or not to include the student's results (and other unit details) on this printout. You should elect to NOT include the extra information if you are printing the form for TEC as they do not require the level, the result and the credits gained for each standard.

Please note that this report WILL include any achievement standards taken by the student as a part of the placement (or attached course) concerned.

2 The audit trail, which was added recently, has been expanded to also record when a placement and/or course is added to or removed from a student

3. Once school is using the document design process to produce nice certificates for their students. To do this they wished to be able to include a table of standards and their results for the placement being printed. This can now be done by including, in the document design, the code for 'Units list with results' which is available under 'Placements' when you are selecting a field to include in the document design.

One school has indicated that they 'lost' students from the gateway database. No other schools have ever reported this and, while I hesitate to suggest that it is 'user error' I can find not other explanation for the deletion of students. One checking the database I found that the students had been removed 'tidily' - i.e. the student along with all placements, courses, unit standard results and course outcomes (all of which are stored in separate places in the database) had all been removed. There is only way in the package where this happens and that is by clicking on the 'Delete this student' button and by typing 'Yes' in response to the warning which follows.

As a result I have added an audit trail to the package which records each time a student is added to or deleted from the database. The contents of this audit trail can be viewed via a new button under 'Utilities'. This will enable the use to see the date and time and name of the person doing the addition or deletion.

Three minor faults have been reported since the last major upgrade and these have now been repaired. Thy are, or were:

1. The new button to show provider details was sitting in front of one of the popup windows.

2. In user-defined lists - the right-alignment > symbol was not being interpreted.

3. The student's date of withdrawal was not 'sticking' i.e. it was not being saved to the database.

A number of small faults appeared in version 1.7.1 - as is not uncommon with a major new release. These have now all been repaired.

In addition, under 'Print Lists' / 'Pre-designed lists' / 'Student by student standards summary' (The top one on the right hand cide), the provider and provider code have been added to each of the standards.

During the twelve gateway seminars held in Greymouth, Nelson and the North Island during May and early June over nine pages of my Gateway book were filled with 91 requests for changes and enhancements. Many were minor screen changes and a few were bugs (three are reported below). A couple didn’t make it through and these are also listed below so that those who made them can snarl at me.

Bug fixes

If you copied a placement from one student to another, sometimes the new placement got a different employer.
Changes made to a course didn’t always get applied to all students taking that course. This included standards, other assessments and costs. Sometimes they DID get copied – and duplicated!
Users given ‘View only students’ rights – along with one or more only rights – were finding that they had FULL editing rights to students. Woops. That has been stopped.

The new download includes the latest file of standards from NZQA.

Main Menu

At the very top of the main screen a new pulldown menu allows you to go directly to the TEC ERS logon screen. (You must, of course, be on-line to do this.)
A new Main Menu button allows you to access the package manual via the Worsfold web site. (You must, of course, be on-line to do this.) The manual is somewhat out of date but we are hoping to replace the manual by on-line video clips in the not too distant future.

Students can now have their photograph displayed on the ‘Overview’ screen.

Of course, it would take a long time to individually attach each student’s photograph, so a bulk method has been provided under Configuration – see below for details. A ‘…’ button near the photograph reveals four further buttons which you can use to resize the photograph frame. Click the ‘…’ button again to hide the resize buttons.

Once a photograph has been attached to a student you can see the name of the photograph file by hovering the mouse over the photograph.

2. A new category (Learner) has been added to the Drivers License possibilities.

3. New fields have been added so that you can record email addresses for each of the two caregivers. (These are now included in the database import for MUSAC schools.

4. As from 2011 two new columns (Date and Person) have been added to the student notes screen. This could not be done part way through a year so it will turn up automatically next year.

5. Assessors

Go to Configuration / Popups and you can now enter details relating to each of the assessors who asses your students’ standards. Each unit standard can now have an ‘Assessor’ attached and there is a new column in each table which allows you to record this. A popup menu of assessors appears when you click in the ‘assessor’ cell on the table. Once an assessor is in place in one of these tables you can view full details of an assessor by right-clicking on their name.

6. Providers

You can now record full contact details for each of your providers. These details are entered either via the usual provider details screen or via Configuration / Popups / Providers. You might well have previously provided some details for providers of courses and these have been kept and attached to the relevant provider.

Once a provider’s details have been entered they can be viewed by right-clicking on the name of the provider in the standards tables.

7. Click on the blue slide on the bottom right hand edge of the Placements screen labeled ‘Learning Plan details’ for a particular placement and you will now be able to record who has been involved in each workplace visit. The choice is now ‘School’, ‘Work broker’ or one of the specified assessors. (see above)

8. When printing the ‘Student Gateway Enrolment (TEC)’ form you can now elect to have either the employer’s physical or postal address included on the form. This choice can be made via a new frame on the ‘Configuration’ screen.

9. When importing students from either MUSAC or Kamar (or IES or PCSchool)) a new button allows you to import an entire class of students in one go. Click on the button, select the class concerned, and all students in that class will be added to your Gateway database.

10. If you use the ‘Back’ and ‘Next’ buttons at the bottom left of the student screen to move between students then they now leave you one the same page as your were viewing for the student you were previously viewing.

11. Each student’s ‘Local school ID’ is now visible near the bottom left hand side of the student data screen. Frequently students’ photographs are named according to this number and you can now check this.

12. The ‘Times note’ field, which was renamed to ‘Hrs/week’ for the TEC documents has been reinstated as a new field. All of these fields can now be included in user-defined documents and lists.

13. If you add a new ‘other assessment’ to a course then an abbreviation is now automatically created and entered for the new assessment. You can, of course, then change it to something more seemly if you wish.

14. The unnecessary ‘Location’ column has been removed from each standard in the various standard tables. It was wasting space.

15. When you enter a placement’s start date the ‘Day’ will now fill in automatically.

IES and PCSchool have recently provided the facility to export a ‘worsfold.csv’ file similar to that provided by Kamar. Integris were approached to do the same but they have indicated that a) it was too difficult and b) in any case, they are withdrawing from the NZ SMS market.
You can globally allocate student email addresses. This is useful if your school has allocated an internal email address to each student. The address format can be selected from a range of possibilities (let me know if yours is not on the list) and you can also specify the right hand part of the address (e.g. ‘kairakau.school.nz’.
Most schools visit Configuration / Expenditure Management and click the large button at the bottom of the screen to have all student costs accumulated on to that screen for the purpose of the TEC report. It is now possible, via a new setting in Configuration, to have this accumulation process performed automatically every time you visit either the Expenditure Management screen or the TEC report printing screen under Lists.

Some schools, however, may well wish to NOT have this automatic accumulation occur. They wish to record certain costs on students and to record other total costs on the Expenditure Management screen – as distinct from those on students. These schools would elect to leave the automatic accumulation switched OFF. (OK Melinda?)

User Defined lists has been expanded to include the ability to design a list relating to ‘Placements’.
One school requested that it be possible, when printing a user-defined list of employers, to include employers from previous years. This is now possible – and it is advisable to add a new column ‘Year’ when designing an ‘employers’ list – if you elect to include employers from previous years – which you can do via a new printing option in the centre of the screen.
The fourth Pre-designed list, Include standards and other assessments’ has had the ‘bottom line’ summary of student achievement added to each student’s display.
A new Pre-designed List – ‘Placements and their details’ has been added at the bottom of the left hand column of lists. Have a look at this as you might find it a useful list.
Student photographs can now be included in user-defined documents. There are three possibilities – left, centre and right aligned.
A button at the top of the TEC report screen allows you to have the report saved to the desktop as a pdf file.
If you included student notes in a user-defined document then they were not appearing very nicely, as line feeds were being ignored. They should be much more nicerer now.

The End-of-Year process has been changed slightly. You can now elect to have all of your employers set to ‘Current’ or to ‘Non current’ or you can leave them unchanged.
The ‘Make a backup’ routine has been replaced with a ‘Copy your Database’ routine. You should be having regular backups of your gateway database made through your school’s backup system. However, you can now copy your current year’s Gateway database to any other disk drive / directory of your choice. This could, of course, include a USB drive – although I’ve found that the copying process can take a while – depending on the speed of your USB port used for the drive.
‘Email a database’

This process, which no longer works following Microsoft’s security enhancements, has been replaced by a full set of instructions. These are the instructions which I have been emailing to those wishing to email me a copy of their database – for diagnostic purposes. Basically, the process involves a) making a copy of the database b) renaming it to a .txt file c) zipping it up and d) emailing it to me. The instructions can be printed out and passed to your IT person if necessary.

4. Import NZQA standards

This process has been sped up by showing only every fiftieth standard.

5. Send emails

This routine now includes three extra buttons to enable you to send a bulk email to a) all first caregivers with emails, b) all second caregivers with emails, c) all caregivers with emails.

1. I accidentally left a test script in the routine which imports students from Kamar. As a result every student's surname on the import list nows appears as 'that. I had not intended for that to happen.

2. In making it possible for course standards to be included on the Enrolment Form, I accidentally stopped all but the first placement standard from appearing. They all appear now.

1. The Three Month Student Outcome form has been added. This is accessed via a new button under 'Print Lists'. The screen will display ALL students and their placements. The left hand column shows dates of previously submitted placements. Click in blank cells in this column to have today's date entered and only placements with today's date in this column will be printed on the form. You may also fill in missing details in the columns labelled 'Outcome Code' , 'Employer/School/Tertiary', 'Contact person', 'Contact number'.

As you click 'Print form' the form will be generated and any changed details will be saved back to the database.
The form (and others) may now be saved as pdf files by clicking the new ‘Save as pdf’ button at the top of the viewing screen.

These new details may also be entered against each students' placements on the 'Withdrawn' tab on their placement screen.

2. I've had several requests to be able to associate one or more courses with a placement - so that units included in associated course(s) are included in the new Student Enrolment Form'. A new pulldown menu has been added on the course screen, beside the course title, to indicate which of the student's placements the course is attached to.

Subsequently, when you print the Student Enrolment Form, any standards attached to these courses will be included along with the placement's standards.

3. A nasty fault in saving placement changes - which was corrupting costs - has been identified and fixed. This was reported by three schools at the end of last year. Everything was fine and costs were saved correctly as they were entered, but the 'Save Placement Changes' button had a fault behind it which was corrupting the data. It has now been found and fixed. Again, my apologies for any inconvenience.

A fault preventing students' placement costs from being displayed has been fixedhas been fixed.

Gateway Student Enrolment Form (TEC)
Gateway Student Amendment Form (TEC)
Gateway Student Withdrawal Form (TEC)

a) Go to a particular student and select a placement. Then click on the Blue ‘Forms signed’ tab in the top right hand corner of the screen. The first three entries on this screen allow you to print the new forms.

b) As before, select a student and then a placement for that student. Then click on the ‘Print a document’ button in the bottom left hand corner of the screen.

Be aware that some details may NOT be automatically filled in on the form. This relates particularly, of course, to the Amendment form, but also to certain fields on the others.

2. Student ethnicity.

TEC have recently requested that the full MOE range of ethnicities for each student be made available and you may now make your selection for ethnicity from the full range, using the popup selection list which displays each student’s ethnicity.

A further new field, required for the completion of the ‘Three Month Student Outcome’ form is the ‘Outcome code’. This may be selected, for each placement, via a new selection popup list on the ‘Outcome’ tab for each placement.

The ‘Three Month Student Outcome’ form will be made available before it is first required early in 2010.

Further, a new tab ‘Notes’ (visible in the illustration above) provides an area where you can record information relating to the placement concerned. e.g. Conversations with the student or the employer.

5. Employers – lists and emails

When printing a list of employers (via ‘Print Lists’ / ‘User-defined lists’) or in sending emails to all employers (via ‘Utilities’ / ‘Send emails’) you may now elect to include ALL employers or only ‘Current’ employers. (A current employer has their ‘Current’ status ticked on the employer definition screen).

6. Student and Placement in list of employers

When printing a user-defined list of employers you may now include either or both of two new fields : ‘Students’ and ‘Placements’. These will cause a list of the students relating to each employer and/or their placements to be included on the list. See the example below wherein names have been hidden by being partially erased.

I've been aware for some time that the instructions on how to download and install an update have detailed one of the two possible appearance of the extraction process. I've no managed to obtain illustrations of the alternative process and these have now been added to the instructions at http://www.worsfoldsoftware.co.nz/WSGWHowtoinstall.html

Kamar has released a new version of their worsfold export file. This version contains more information relating to each student. A new utility has been added to match that available for MUSAC schools. The new utility is visible now for Kamar schools and allows you to globally update data relating to all standards and to all students. Latest information concerning results and student data can be globally imported from the new file worsfold.csv file.

A small fault in the display of costs for courses and placements has been repaired. This caused one school to lose the costs which they had entered. (The costs were still there but were not being displayed - so that on saving they disappeared. Woops... all fixed now.

Students
1. There is a new document available titled ‘Student Detail Form’. This has been requested by several schools and is a two-page document which follows the format on that provided by the TEC and lists :

Personal Details                                   Learning Plan
Student declaration                              Additional Information.
Placement details

2. If a change is made to the costs of a course through the course definition screen then this change is now carried through to all students taking that course.

3. Three new pieces of information (‘Order number’, ‘Paid?’, and ‘Invoice number’) have been added to every area where costs are entered. (These include student costs, unit standard costs, course costs, overhead costs etc). These are also now reported via the cost screens.

There is not a lot of room on the screen to display these extra columns so some arrows have been added which enable you to slide the extra columns out into the display area. Re-clicking the yellow strip of arrows will slide them back in again. Both the ‘In’ and ‘Out’ versions are shown below.

Please note that the use of these columns is optional. If you wish to turn them OFF then you may do so via a new item under ‘Configuration’.

4. When you attach standards to course and placements :

a) You can now select Achievement Standards as well as unit standards.
b) The Domain is now shown for each standard in the selection panel.

5. A series of Date columns have been added to each of the displays of standards. These columns are :

The fourth, ‘Completed’, is not a ‘Date’ column. It toggles between ‘Yes’ and ‘No’ when you click in it. The other five are all ‘date’ columns. To quickly enter the current date just right-click in the column and the current date will be automatically filled in. If you edit this to another date then this will be then remembered as the ‘current date’ for further right-clicking in other columns.

These six columns can be turned On or Off via the new Configuration item.

6. If, on the Placements screen, you slide out the blue ‘Learning Plan’ tab on the bottom right hand side of the screen, you will see a new table where you can list visits made or to be made to the student on site.

7. Two new fields have been added for each student. They are ‘Driver’s license’ and ‘Vehicle pass’. The first is a pull-down menu with three options : ‘None’, ‘Restricted’ and ‘Full’, and the second is a simple tickbox to indicate whether or not the student has a vehicle pass.

These new fields can be added to student documents and the new user-defined lists.

8. Several schools reported that the ‘Next’ button recycles through students after a certain number. That was a very tricky one to solve but it started recycling when it came to a student with no placements. It’s all fixed now.

9. Several data fields on students imported from MUSAC did not have the data ‘stick’ when imported. These fields related to medical and caregiver information. The new utility to update data from MUSAC reinstates any missing data.

10. The line being currently viewed in the costs or standards tables is now highlighted.

11. If you print a document for a student from the student screen the document will now be displayed in a preview screen prior to sending it to the printer.

12. Some users like to add a ‘category’ to their employers so that when selecting an employer for a new placement they only have to select from those in a nominated category. These categories have been standardized to match the TEC categories into which each placement falls. (You can still edit this list of categories as necessary).

13. Placements can now occur on a ‘Tue-Thu’ day combination – as well as any other two-day pair.

14. If a new unit is added to a particular placement on a student then you will be given the opportunity to automatically have this unit also added to all other students who have a placement of the same name.

15. Some schools have used the ‘Notes’ area to store a photograph of each student. This can be done by cutting and pasting the student photograph from an external source into the ‘General notes’ area for each student.

Edit Users

If a user had been given just the ‘View only’ option to allow them to view but not edit student information – then they COULD still edit data. They can’t do that any more.

Configuration

1. There are two new ‘switches’ which allow you to turn the use of columns off or on. The two sets of columns are the new cost columns (Order number, Paid and Invoice number) and the new Date columns from the lists of standards.

2. If you alter a student’s costs at any time then a signal will be sent to ‘Configuration’ so that, next time you enter the ‘Expenditure Management’ area the following message will be displayed, warning you of the need to reimport student costs.

Print Lists

1.   There is a new document available titled ‘Student Detail Form’. This has been requested by several schools and is a two-page document which follows the format on that provided by the TEC and lists :

Personal Details                                   Learning Plan
Student declaration                              Additional Information.
Placement details

2. A new financial report, which provides a full listing of all costs, is now available as a new button under ‘print Lists’. This list may be sorted either by Cost centre (e.g. below) or by Order number.

3. Some employer fields (e.g. ‘Physical Address’) were not coming through correctly on documents. They are now.

4. There are several new ‘Pre-designed lists’.

a) A Gender by Ethnicity Analysis. This takes four pages, one for each of the years 11, 12 and 13 and a fourth which shows totals for all years. An example is shown below :

b) A list of standards with progress dates

This lists each standard for each student along with any entries in the six new columns.

c) A list of standards with progress dates within the next ??? days.

Enter a number of days (e.g. 7) and the list will only include references to standards where one or more of the dates occur(s) within the next specified number of days.

d) A list of standards which are still incomplete even though the ‘Completion due’ date has passed.

e) A list of placement visits made.

f ) A list of placement visits due in the next ??? days.

5. User defined lists.

You can now design your own lists of students and their data, Employers and their data, or Providers and their data. The screen initially looks like this :

Initially you will not have any previously designed lists listed, but I’ve been doing a fair bit of testing.

To design a new list click on the button labeled ‘Start a new list’ then type in a name for your list. At the top of the screen decide which of the three options applies to your list : students, employers or providers. As you make the selection the relevant list of fields will appear on the right.

Next, select those fields on information which you wish to appear in your list by clicking on them and they will appear in the grid at the bottom of the screen. In the example below I’ve designed a list of employers.

I’ve altered the width of the first three columns by grabbing and sliding the column gap just to the right of the column numbers.

I’ve also decided to have the total number of placement printed at the bottom of the last column. Its title ‘Number of Placements’ can be edited and the column can also be right-aligned, as shown below.

Finally, ‘Save this list’ and it will be added to the list of lists on the left hand side of the screen.
Once there, select it and then either print it (by clicking ‘Generate this list’). An example of such a list is shown below.

Alternatively, you can send the contents of the list to a csv file (that’s ‘comma separated variables’). This is a text file in a format which can be open in a text editor or in Excel. If you choose the later you’ll be asked to provide a file name for your export file and given the opportunity to proceed directly to Excel to view the resulting file.

This way you can generate a text file of data relating to student, employers or providers. The numbers of each will be printed at the bottom of each list e.g. :

6. When printing documents for students you can now select more than one document at a time. You must hold down the ‘Cntrl’ key while you select multiple documents.

The process will run through every student checking any standards they are taking against the results held in the MUSAC database. Where results are ‘better’ than those already held they will be updated and the progress reported on the screen. (See example below).

This process will do exactly that. It will run through each student checking their data held in the MUSAC database, updating the Gateway database with the latest information.

Other

There is a new menu item at the top of the main screen via which you can access information relating to two other Worsfold Software Ltd packages for schools. These are :

A further small adjustment to the costs import routine in preparation for the Returns. In one further case a particular cost was not being trasnferred correctly.

The new file of standards from NZQA for 2009 has been released and is a part of this download.

A fault has been found in the routine which accumulates costs from student entries. Some standards were doubling up and being counted twice.

If you had not done the end-of-year rollover to 2009 the program was throwing you out, saying that it could not find the database. This has been fixed and you will, once again, be able to log on.

The menu to select another database was not displaying one previous year correctly. It is now.

Three schools have reported duplication of unit standards in the students Achievement Summary. They all report that it was caused by having a student with the same standards attached to a placement and to a course or to two courses and then deleting one of the duplications. However, the duplicated standards attached to the students were still being reported. This should no longer happen!

Another school noticed that one of the predesigned tables was reporting results for those unit standards attached to placements but not for those attached to courses.

A fault was found in the TEC returns - where the 'cost details' were overwriting the whole document.

You now have to click on the two blude slides on the placements screen to get them to pop out. Previously they were jumping out at you when you least expected it.

A small fault was found when adding loaned items to a student and then saving changes.

A second small fault was found in the process of accumulating student costs to the Configuration summary.

Following the North Island series of Gateway seminars the following changes have been made to the Gateway package. Over 110 suggestions and requests were recorded during the seminars. A lot of them were things that I spotted which I felt could be nicer but many were excellent enhancements to the package. Not all have been auctioned yet. A very few are still on my list of ‘things to do’. The following are the details of those which require explanation.

On each placement screen there is now a place to record the outcome of the placement.
Each student cost must now have a cost category associated with it (e.g. Equipment). This is to enable a new process which amalgamates all of the costs from students into a costs summary in preparation for the financial returns. (See second illustration above)
When attaching unit standards to a placement or to a course via the standards selection screen you can now type in the number of the standard for which you are searching via a small text box at the top of the search screen. This speeds up the process considerably.
You can now attach Achievement Standards to a placement. To do this type in the number of the Achievement standard and you will be asked to fill in the rest of the details via a small window. Since these standards are NOT help in the standards table of the database you must enter the title etc yourself.

The student comment area on each placement now automatically expands when you click on it. It will reduce back to normal when you click away – somewhere else on the screen.
You can now remove unit standards and/or other assessments from a student’s course without having to remove them from the course itself. (Right-click on the offending assessment to do so). This does come with a warning that if you were to later alter the course concerned (e.g . by adding another unit standard) then all standards and assessment would be reattached to the student. Where courses are concerned it is assumed that every student is talking every standard and assessment. If not, then you should really put an X as their result to show that they have withdrawn. However, if you insist, you CAN now delete individual standards and assessments from student’s courses.
One person wanted to record ticks against documents for a placement even though a placement had not yet been specified. Apparently she was in the process of preparing for a placement which she hadn’t finalized and wanted to generate the documents and record them even though there was no placement in place! You can now do that too!
Courses can now have default costs entered against their unit standards and other assessments. These will come through on to the students taking the course and can thereafter be modified for individual students if necessary.

Both of these have a gateway logo embedded (rather than my Worsfold one) and you might like to alter the other documents to include the new logo. I’ve included two Gateway logos with this release. One is a coloured one (gwlogocolour.jpg) and the other is black and white (gwlogobw.jpg). Once you’ve installed the update they will be available via your \gw directory.
Some of the documents may require a little alteration to have the logo in place. I’ve modified the program so that if you right-align a logo then the text will wrap around it on the left hand side.

Costs management The process of managing costs for the purposes of the return has been modified somewhat to allow you to record both Overhead costs (those not associated with a particular student) and Expenditure (totals of costs relating to students). Both of these are managed via the ‘Configuration’ area where there are now two tabs.

a. Expenditure Overheads

The first tab allows you to record overhead costs and it is here that you will see any costs which you had previously entered into the package. Should any of these entries relate to students then you might wish to remove them from this area.
b) Expenditure management

The second tab allows you to record a summary of student specific costs. It also displays the overhead totals in a separate column. Now the good news is that at the bottom of the screen there is a large button which, if you click it, and after giving approval, the program will run through all of the students gathering all of their costs (student costs, course costs, unit standard costs, other assessment costs etc) and will report them all on this screen, automatically filling in the totals for each cost centre.

This is why it is necessary to specify the cost centre (e.g. Equipment) when recording costs against students. N.B. All costs relating to unit standards and other assessments are automatically recorded under the ‘Assessment Costs’ centre.

If you choose NOT to click the button to have student costs amalgamated then you are still able to enter student related costs in the usual way – by clicking in the centre and specifying the details of each expenditure. However, please realize that if you later DO click the button to amalgamate costs recorded against individual students then this screen will be cleared of all previous entries prior to the gathering process.

There is a ‘Help’ button on this screen which displays further explanation of the process.

I have received the following instructions from Kamar :
To export the worsfold.csv file :

The following enhancements have been made to the Gateway program since its last major release in February

A new top-line menu item now provides you with direct access to the Worsfold Software website. This is next to the ‘Select database’ menu item at the top of the main screen. It is intended that this process will be developed further to allow you to install an update more directly in future. The main problem with this to date has been the firewalls in school which (wisely) prevent the unauthorized downloading and installing of programs without IT approval.

There is now a second slide on the right hand side of the Placements screen, as shown below.

On this screen you can record both the specific Goals and Tasks for the placement in question (and the date completed) and any particular assessment arrangements that apply. You can use the two buttons at the right hand side to move a selected goal up or down the list.

Once you have finished click on the “Save and Close’ button (or, if you do NOT wish to make the changes then just click on the blue ‘Learning Plan’ strip).

The learning Plan has been added to the list of placement specific documents available via the upper ‘Forms signed’ slide.
Items loaned to students

On each student’s Notes screen is now a table where you may record the details of items loaned to students. You may record the item, the date loaned, the course or placement with which it is associated, the date returned and the item’s value.

A second emergency contact has been added to each student’s ‘Medical’ screen. These details may also be included in user-designed documents.

The choice of ‘Various’ has been added to the list of possible days on which a placement or course takes place.

One person asked if they could put full stops instead of slashes in dates as they liked to use the numeric keypad to enter dates. You can now do that and the program will convert them back to slashes for you. So, if you enter e.g. ‘5.7.8’ it will be converted to ‘05/07/2008’.

Two new buttons have been added at the bottom of the student screen to enable you to jump to the previous or next student without having to pull out the student selection slide.

The two ‘Email’ labels – for the student and for the employer on the placements screen – have been replaced by buttons labeled ‘Email’. Provided that there is an email address specified, you may send an email to either the student or the employer by clicking on this button. You will arrive in your email program – provided that your system provides you with the right to do so.

Well, most of them are. The popup lists of employers, courses etc are now automatically resorted into alphabetical order each time you add a new entry.

A request has been received to have the Day combo react to key presses so that if you type W then Wednesday will automatically been selected. This functionality has been added to the Day (on the Placements screen) and the Ethnicity (on the Student details screen).

You can enter results from students’ unit standards via their Placements and Courses screens. You can now also enter the results via the ‘Achievement Summary’ screen, where you can see all of the students standards in one place. You can also add ‘Other outcome’ results via the same screen.

These can now include M = Merit. A merit result is permissible for certain unit standards. The program does not have access to which particular units do allow a merit result so it has been made available to all. It will be up to you to ensure that you do not allocate a merit result to a unit standard which does not allow it.

In order to be able to generate the Ministry’s Funding Summary you need a place where you can record the various operating costs of your Gateway program. To do this, a new tab has been added under ‘Configuration’, as shown below. (Yes, the data is very spurious as I’ve simply been using it for testing.)

The information on the right hand side looks really strange but, if you click on any of them then all will be revealed. E.g. the first one appears as :

In other words, each area allows you to enter dates, amounts and descriptions. These are totalled automatically and the figures returned to the previous screen.

At the bottom of the previous screen you can enter the total income received and the total carried forward from the previous year’s operations. All of this information will appear on the printed summary as detailed below.

You have three to choose from and you can now ask that they be all printed on one sheet of paper (where possible) rather than on three separate sheets.

Woops, I had overlooked those. They are now recognized and reported in the various summaries.

A new choice has been added to Pre-designed lists. This one lists each student’s placements and displays whether or not each of the possible forms has been printed and whether or not it has been sent to the TEC.

Visit the ‘Printing’ area and select ‘MOE Returns’. The following screen will be displayed, via which you can enter details which will appear on the printed report.

Once you have the information entered (or even before, if you cannot wait) click on the ‘Generate Summary’ button and you will see :

You can enlarge this display by double-clicking on it, and you will see that the various expenditure and income totals, along with the other information required, is displayed on the report.

There is a button at the top of the screen labeled ‘Email this document to…’. If you click on this button then the following happens. A pdf file of the report is produced (and saved into a new sub directory called ‘\gw\emailled returns’. The program then attempts to attach this document to an email in your email program addressed to servicecentre@tec.govt.nz.

I have recently experienced some problems with this process on my computer which, I suspect, has had the operating system modified by Microsoft to prevent the sending of emails with attachments via other programs. This is a security precaution on their part which prevents us from achieving our intentions. The same process has worked for several years via Worsfold’s other software packages, so it may or may not work for you.

If it fails then you will have to create an email manually and attach the returns file named e.g. ‘Butler College2008.pdf’ in the emailed returns directory off your gateway directory (\gw).

When designing your own documents you can now include ‘All units – no results’ and/or ‘All units with results’

When printing pre-designed lists you can now request a list of those students who have placements on a particular date. You might need to include the ‘Include various’ option if you have indicated that a placement occurs on the day : Various’.

One school asked for a ‘General Notes’ area where you could record ‘things to be done’. It there, as a new button under the ‘Utilities’ area. You can record notes and date them and print them.

You could not delete an assessment from a course. The only way to do it was to delete the entire course and to then re-enter it. However, this left the original assessment still attached to the students and reported on their ‘Achievement summary’. A routine has been added to remove such ‘phantom’ assessments and unit standards.

I do still have several requests on my list which I haven’t included in this round. So, if you’ve made a request which is not yet included, it hasn’t been forgotten. Never-the-less, feel free to remind me just in case it has slipped through the net.

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Briefly, three schools have reported that their program has no text on the labels, making it impossible to know where to click.

As a result ALL of the nice new buttons and labels and tickboxes etc have been removed and replaced by the old Microsoft ones. We will continue to investigate the cause of the problem but, in the meantime, this version will work nicely for everyone

The next release will be in June 2008 and will incorporate a number of features requested by those using the package.

Gateway course management software

Version 1.7.17 Released 2nd December 2011 the new version

Latest changes to Worsfold Software’s STAR Course Management software