Week 5 Update: Wrapping Up the EAP—But We're Just Getting Started

[SamGarza1]

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We’re reaching the end of the Early Access Program (EAP) for Differentiation Tags, and we want to extend a big thank-you to everyone who participated. Your feedback and engagement have been essential in helping us validate that this feature will bring real value to educators and students alike.

What’s Next?

While the EAP is coming to a close, we want to reassure you that access to the feature will not be removed. We’ll also continue monitoring this community group and engaging with your feedback. Your insights have helped shape our roadmap, and we’re not done yet.

Moving into Feature Preview

We’re preparing to move Differentiation Tags into the Feature Preview phase. This will enable us to collect feedback on a larger scale while making continued improvements. The feature preview will be part of the June release, hitting beta on May 19 and production on June 21. Keep an eye on the release notes which will contain more details. Community guides for this feature will also be available soon. 

As we move forward, we’re actively working on enhancements you helped us identify, including:

• CSV upload for Tags
• Filtering by Tag on the People page
  Bulk removal of Tags
• …and more ideas surfaced by this group!

Keep the Feedback Coming

Your experience helps us prioritize and improve. Even after the EAP, we encourage you to keep sharing what’s working—and what’s not—so we can continue refining Differentiation Tags and exploring where to go next.

And starting next week, we’ll open this community group so anyone can join without an invite. We’re excited to broaden the conversation and hear from even more users. And if you haven't already please complete the below feedback survey for Tags. 

Differentiation Tags Survey

Thanks again for helping us shape this feature—we couldn’t have done it without you!

[GarethLogan]

Hi @SamGarza1 , 

thanks so much for all the updates on this. I’ve been helping test the new feature and I’m really impressed—it’s a great improvement.

It resolves some of the issues we’ve had at the institution I work with, particularly around marking students in separate groups. I understand it’s going into Production as a Feature Preview on June 21st. A couple of quick questions:

1. Some of our staff are keen to use this with real students in August. Do you think it's advisable to use a Feature Preview in a live environment? I realise that might be a difficult question, but does the Feature Preview label imply it's not guaranteed to be stable and therefore not yet suitable for live marking?

2. We've also been testing this on Production. Am I right in thinking it's not expected to be functioning fully on Prod yet, and that proper functionality is only currently supported in Beta?

Thanks again for all your work on this and for any insights you can share.
Best,
Gareth

[SamGarza1]

Hi @GarethLogan , 

Apologies for the delay in answering your questions. I've left answers below. 

1. Short answer is yes, we believe this feature is ready to be used. The primary works flows of creating/editing Tags, using them with Assign To, and as filters in the gradebook have been well tested internally and by our early adopters. However, we still have a list of refinements we plan to add to improve usability and functionality and large courses (1,000+) may have a harder time using the feature until we add CSV support. You can see a list of refinement ideas here and I'll be posting an update in the group soon with more specific information. 
2. Since Differentiation Tags is now in feature preview we'll be following the deploy calendar. Meaning updates or bug fixes will be deployed to beta for two weeks before deploying to production. 

Overall, the core of the feature is unlikely to see major workflow or UI changes but we'll still be adding improvements like CSV upload, filtering by Tag on the People page, and minor UI/UX updates like showing Tags as their own category in the Traditional Gradebook filter list.