This is a repeat of an oft-voiced theme. Much of it has been addressed before in other places. I would like to focus on something that I haven't seen much mention of (and bring up a few of the other points).
The chance of an idea mentioned in the community influencing development within the next three months is necessarily small. It's the wrong thing for people to look at.
Let me explain. I'm acknowledging up front that I'll get some of the details wrong.
Canvas has a roadmap that goes out much further than the next 3 months. The further out things are, the less crowded the space is and the more available time and resources there are. When you're 1.5 years out, there are some big ideas but still space for other things. When you get down to 1 year out, some of the space has been filled in by other projects or by better analyzing how much work is required for the big projects. Those big ideas get listed in the Priorities and Ideas area. They also change over time. The closer they are to implementation, the better defined they are. That also means they have a better idea of exactly what is involved and how much time it will take. They also take a bigger chunk of the available resources since they're past the "let's figure out what we're going to do" phase and moved on to development. By that point, it's difficult to change how things are going to be implemented.
By the time you get to six months out and even three months out, the available resources for introducing new things is a small percentage of the overall time available.
In other words, Canvas doesn't have much time or resources to allocate to new ideas that haven't already been considered when they get to the three month mark. By the time they can say "this will influence development this quarter," or the more-frequent "this will not influence development this quarter," there's very little room for anything new.
The most recent change is that now Canvas is responding with a more definitive result than they did before.
Before we were left in limbo. There was a period of time where it was on "Product Radar" and that meant that they were aware of it and, I think, that they had at least talked about it internally. It didn't mean they were working on developing it or that if they were, that it would be developed exactly as described in the feature idea. It might have even meant that they had discussed and decided that it wouldn't be going forward at the current point in time. All we had in the Community was "product radar."
Product Radar was better than what we had before that. They keep adapting and revising the process and it gets more open each time.
With the move from product radar to where we're at now, they decided they would let us know what was going to happen within the current quarter. They can't do that for every idea that's out there, so they picked an arbitrary amount (10%) to let us know about. They also don't want to be too prescriptive because there are a lot of ideas that they may want to implement but they're not as high of a priority and they don't know when they're going to get to them. If they promise that something will happen in the next year and it doesn't, then everyone who wanted that idea is upset because Canvas didn't deliver. If I were Instructure, I would be wary of promising too much too soon after what happened in the first three years of New Quizzes or SpeedGrader 2.0. But by the time they get down to three months, they have a pretty good idea of what's going to be worked on.
The process is not perfect, but it is better than it used to be. They're telling us the long term projects in one spot and they're telling us the immediate projects in another. Instructure keeps improving the way they present information to us. The documentation team is now disseminating the information in multiple documents. It used to be that we would get release notes. Now there are multiple release notes, formatted and organized in several ways, and it's much easier to find information.
There's also the issue of community ideas being just one of the places where the ideas come from. The documentation team has addressed all of this previously.
Probably more important is whether those ideas fit into the bigger picture. People hold beliefs about things that come from their experiences. If you have different experiences, you believe differently. You think Canvas should do one thing but someone else thinks that's the stupidest idea ever and that it should happen another way. Canvas has to reconcile those and come up with something that works for most. Or it may be so polarizing that there is no good solution.
There have been some ideas here that got a lot of votes because instructors had all of their students sign in an vote for it or because a Canvas admin at a very large school got many of their faculty to vote it up. Some of those ideas have been highly specialized that would benefit one particular school or perhaps a particular state, but it wouldn't have much use outside of that. Canvas is bigger than one school, state, or even country. By the way, one of those ideas I'm thinking of finally did get developed, years later, and there is now a calculator in New Quizzes. It's not the one that was suggested in that original feature idea and I believe I read that the people who made the request aren't even using the same calculator anymore that they were when they made the request.
Other times, people have ideas that improve the functionality in a small way. In fairness, Canvas has steered us that way by telling us not to write a kitchen sink requests and if there are multiple requests within an idea, then it's difficult for Canvas to track which ones really have traction. But if Canvas is considering overhauling an entire area, such as communications, then making short-term changes to allow HTML within submission comments may not line up with the long-term goal. It also means that Canvas now has to support that going forward for a while, even if it was a temporary solution.
One of the most insightful statements I've seen is when Canvas said "we're not developing [legacy] quizzes any more." Then you knew. You didn't have to worry about it. There was no more questioning. No more anxiety. No more scanning through your favorite requests every three months with the hopes that maybe, just maybe, there would be movement. Of course, they went and broke it because they were developing internationalization support, but that's a different issue. They also have started commenting on why ideas are archived. That was better than them just being moved to cold storage without an explanation.
It is really frustrating to see the thing that you're passionate about sit on the sideline and not get developed. It may seem that Canvas is intentionally rubbing a sore when they keep reiterating that it won't be worked on this quarter. They're not, but the underlying processes make it difficult to ever say something will be worked on within the next three months when it hasn't already been flagged somewhere else.
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