Product Updates April 2026

The assignment season has started! What does that mean in Aula? It means that we’ve been preparing the ground to receive all the hard work of the students in the most seamless way possible. Learners and educators can already benefit from the improvements we’re making to assignment and group creation. Check what enhancements these are below.

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✅ Completed Work

💬 Improved Data Gathered on Messages

Goal: Better understand the user engagement and behavior, allowing for increments in the product experience.

Update: Now we capture data on key user actions: start a new message, open existing or archived conversations, view participants, invite participants, and remove participants, mute chat, archive chat, and leave chat, and when a user successfully creates a new conversation.

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🖋️ Description in Group Sets

Goal: Enable the addition of a description when creating a group set.

Update: Educators can now add a description to a group set alongside its name when creating one, which helps students know the context and details of such groups. Such description is displayed for students below the group set title.

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🪛 Creation of an “Edit Group” Modal

Goal: Enable educators to seamlessly update their groups across all screen sizes.

Update: A dedicated "Edit Group" modal has been introduced. It enables editing of existing groups, including name, avatar, and participants. Institution-managed groups have clear restrictions on editable fields. However, if educators try to edit participants in a group that has already made a submission, they will be warned that this is not possible.

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🫙 Clearer Information for Educators in Group Sets

Goal: Save educators’ time by displaying clearer information and error messages, and allowing for participants search.

Update: A message stating “Updated file is not a CSV file” is displayed when there’s a file format issue; when emails are used to add students to groups, but they don’t correspond to the emails of any students in the space, that is clearly stated now. Speaking of students in a space, there’s also a Search feature to find participants within the group list to help to quickly find matching participants and handle the case when there are no matches.

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✂️ Deleting Group Sets and Group Conversations

Goal: Give educators the opportunity to delete group sets and group conversations, and make sure that this is what they mean.

Update: A warning message is displayed when an educator wants to delete a group set or a group message, confirming if they’re sure they want to proceed.

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➕ Adding Oneself to a Message Group

Goal: Show educators where to go to add themselves to group conversations.

Update: If an educator is part of a conversation, they will easily be able to navigate by clicking on it. If they’re not part of it, they will view a message stating where to click to get themselves added to a group conversation. 

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❇️ A More Organised View of Analytics on Mobile

Goal: Have Engagement Analytics displayed in mobile as organised as in desktop.

Update: The numbers and overall information are no longer truncated when analytics are accessed from a mobile device. Viewing Engagement data in mobile now is as comfortable as it is in desktop, which is another step towards a design that is responsive across devices.

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🐞 Bug Fixes

⏹️ White Screen Issue on Anonymous Assignments

Problem:
When an educator created an anonymous assignment and navigated to Handin to view submissions, opening the submission page for students who haven't submitted resulted in a white screen.

✔️ Solution:
We added the necessary error handling for non-submitted cases, and now a proper “no submissions” message is shown.

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⌛ Time to Load Groups Screen

Problem:
The group page suffered a delay of 30-40 second load time.

✔️ Solution:
Now the information that matters the most to educators loads first. The second most important data (like how many students there are or how many educators there are in a group) as it requires calculation. This information hierarchy makes the screen loads faster than having all the information loading at once.

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⭐ Star/Unstar Icon on Newly Assigned Spaces

Problem:
The star/unstar icon wasn’t visible on the space cards in the Recently Viewed section for newly assigned spaces.

✔️ Solution:
All spaces now, including newly assigned ones, have the star/unstar icon that can be clicked. 

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⭐ Visibility of Educators Being Added to a Space

Problem:
When adding more than five or six educators at once to a space, the user could no longer see the last names they’ve added.

✔️ Solution:A scroll bar was added to the box where educators are added, so now you just have to scroll up and down to view all of the colleagues you’re adding to a space.