Introducing PressPrimer Assignment 2.2

We’re excited to announce that 2.2 releases of the PressPrimer Assignment suite of plugins are now available. From PowerPoint support and late policies in the free plugin to advanced watermarking and AI spending controls in premium, the releases are packed with useful features for WordPress sites that use assignments for student evaluation.

Here’s what’s new.

PowerPoint Submissions

PowerPoint files (.pptx) are now a supported submission type. Students can submit presentations the same way they submit documents, and graders can view every slide directly in the browser with no downloads required.

The system works a lot like the PDF viewer already does, with controls for next and previous slides, a slide counter, and keyboard navigation. Text extraction is fully supported for AI-assisted grading and other tools. One caveat worth mentioning though is that in-browser rendering libraries for PowerPoint aren’t as advanced as they are for other file types, so rendering should be seen as a close approximation, not a pixel-perfect replacement of what’s offered in PowerPoint.

Late submission policies

In earlier releases, assignment late penalties were all or nothing; either an assignment could be submitted late or it couldn’t, and there were no time-bound penalties. In PressPrimer Assignment 2.2, the late assignment policy has been expanded to support grading penalties and to block assignments after a certain time period. In other words, if an assignment is due on Friday at 5:00 p.m., you can now allow submissions through Sunday at midnight, but anyone submitting an assignment after the initial deadline incurs a 10% penalty. After Sunday at midnight, submissions are blocked entirely.

Per-student overrides

Educators know that accommodations must sometimes be made for students dealing with exceptional circumstances. To complement the assignment-level policies introduced above, teachers and administrators can now set individual schedules for assignments. The available-from date and due date can now be overriden at the student level, and a note visible only to instructors can be added to explain why the override was granted.

But how does that work if you now have several competing dates? Student overrides win over a group schedule, which in turn wins over the assignment default. That means that if a student is ill and needs an extension, or has another commitment and needs to work on an assignment early, the student-level overrides will allow them to do that.

New onboarding wizard

To help new users get started with PressPrimer Assignment, the previous walkthrough has been replaced with a more interactive example that creates an assignment. Instead of starting from scratch, or just getting an overview of what’s available, the new wizard allows educators to produce a usable assignment in less than five minutes. We’re hoping that the new tools make it easier for people to start using the plugin as quickly as possible.

Full LearnDash Groups integration

Just like we added in PressPrimer Quiz 3.0, the Assignment suite of plugins now has full support for the groups system in LearnDash instead of PressPrimer’s native groups. If LearnDash is active on a site, you can choose which groups system you want to use. Reports, assignment systems, and other plugin tools are automatically updated to use the selected group system.

AI rate limiting

Our AI-assisted grading tools save time and help instructors work more efficiently, but on a busy site, the API costs can add up. To make it easier to control spending, PressPrimer Assignment School 2.2 gives administrators direct control over spending. You can set limits by user and by site, and when limits are reached, you can choose whether to block the requests or allow them with a warning. Teachers see how many requests they have left in the grading interface, and administrators can track site spending.

Submission watermarking

Over in the Enterprise add-on, we’ve added a new feature for sites that work with confidential and sensitive information to reduce the risk of submissions being leaked. When a grader downloads a copy of a student’s submission, the plugin can now optionally stamp a watermark that can’t be removed to the download. It can include a custom label and the name of the person downloading the file.

The setting can be controlled at the assignment and site level, and the feature never blocks downloads. Students can always download their original files, but graders get a watermarked copy to reduce the risk of it being shared outside of the site.

Audit Log export

The audit log can now be exported to CSV format based on your filter criteria. It includes a complete set of information from the logs (including raw event data in JSON format) for compliance reviews and analysis. Exports stream in batches so even large logs can be exported without issue.

Get the updates

The free PressPrimer Assignment plugin is on WordPress.org now. The premium add-on updates are available to users with an active license through the WordPress dashboard.

Note that some features are designed to work together, so it’s important to update all plugins to use what’s new. As an example, the late policy system and student overrides share a scheduling model, so to use the new system both plugins must be updated.

We hope you find the updates useful! As always, let us know in the comments how you’re using the new features, and reach out on our contact page if you have requests.