How are the Instructure Guides updated?

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This lesson discusses how often the Instructure product guides are updated and how they are published.

How often are guides updated?

All guides are updated so the lessons match their product's production environment. For this reason, guide updates are typically published near the same time that feature updates are released to production.

The Community Team may also complete updates for new or existing documentation that do not relate directly to a product release. Some of these updates are based on feedback received from customers and employees. For organizational purposes, these updates are typically published at the same as the release updates.

For example, Canvas is scheduled to release updates to production on May 15, 2021. The Community team will also publish updates for the Canvas Guides on the same day. These updates will include information related to the 2021-05-15 Release Notes in addition to any other tasks that have been completed since the last release. The next update for the Canvas Guides would occur on the date of the next Canvas release or deploy that includes customer-facing changes.

How are lesson updates published?

The Community Team uses a documentation management platform to organize and update all Instructure product guides. When lessons are published from that platform to the Community site, entire manuals often to be published (e.g., the Canvas Student Guide). This means that every lesson in that manual is replaced with a new version, even though many of the lessons are replaced with a new version that is identical to the previous version. Because of this, the Canvas Guides Last Updated Date sidebar may not accurately reflect the frequency that a lesson was actually updated.

Note: Currently, the Last Updated Date sidebar only displays for Canvas guides.