LearnPlatform Release Notes: July 2023 Recap

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This month, we added a 'Retired' product state to improve Community and District library management; made Archived products accessible via the Products table; added 'School Site' to the Educator Usage Details table; made improvements to the Product Request Table, My Tasks area, and Product Overview Page; and made it possible for administrators to turn off teacher access to the Community Library.

‘Retired’ Product State to streamline District and LearnCommunity Library Management

Problem to solve:

A number of duplicate product entries have been added to the LearnCommunity Library over the years, leading to:

• confusion among administrators about which product entry to add to their library

• incomplete data and evidence attached to products

• frustration from providers for not having an accurate representation of their product suite in the library

We’ve been unable to remediate these duplicate entries until now because we can’t simply unpublish product duplicates if they’ve already been added to a customer library.

Solution:

The “retired” product state allows customers to continue using a product in their organization library (except for use in provider applications), while removing it from publication in the LearnCommunity Library.

What’s new:

• From the Management > Products table, Retired products are indicated with a new system column titled “Product State LearnCommunity Library”.
• Published = available in both the LearnCommunity Library and an organization library.
• Retired = only available in an organization library.
• Published products are the entries with the most up-to-date and accurate product information since they are listed in the LearnCommunity Library.
• Retired products are not maintained by LP or edtech providers post-retirement, so we encourage admins to replace retired duplicate entries with their published counterpart (i.e. the ‘replacement product’).
• Admins can access additional information about retired products by clicking into a product from the Management > Products table and accessing the “Overview” tab.
• In the case of retired duplicate entries, this is also where admins can locate the product’s published counterpart (i.e. the ‘replacement product’), which is the version that will be maintained and updated moving forward.

Additional resources:

• Instructure Product Blog Post
• Technical Resource

Archived products are now accessible in Management > Products table

Background:

Archiving products from an organization library provides admins with a way to maintain any historical data they’ve attached to a product, while removing it from the organization (i.e. teacher) library view. 

Problem to solve:

When an admin archives a product it is removed from the organization library, but they have no way to access the archived product to refer to the historical data or reference an ongoing list of archived products.

Solution:

• Admins can now access archived products from their Management > Products table by using the “Product State” filter.
• Archived products are indicated with a new system column titled “Product State Organization Library”. Hovering over an entry will also indicate the date in which a product was archived.

School site info added to the Educator Usage Details table

The Inventory Dashboard Educator Usage Details table now provides more granular information about the site (i.e. school) and organization (i.e. district) in which an educator is located.

This information can help administrators hone in on which educators they’d like to request feedback from based not only on whether they use a product, but also which site or organization they are located.

This table can also be easily exported and shared as a csv file.

Improvements to Product Request Table

In response to customer confusion about the way open requests are counted, some improvements have been done with the product request table.

Last requested in a new date column that can help users identify the most recent requests.

Open requests has been more clearly titled Unacknowledged Requests - there are no changes to the data, but now it is more clear what count is being displayed.  Admins can now see if they have requests they need to respond to.

Progress column is now called Review Progress, so it is clear this column indicates whether or not reviews have been assigned or completed.

Status column is now called Product Status. With so many statuses, it’s now more clear what admins are seeing in this view.

Enhancements to My Tasks

Based on customer feedback, we’ve made the following enhancements to My Tasks:

• Link to Product details from a task - leveraging this component from Inventory Dashboard, customers can now use the kabob menu to open a new tab for product details.  
• If product IS NOT in org library, users will see “View Product in LearnCommunity”
• If product IS in org library users will see “View Product in Organization Library”
• If the product IS in the org library AND the user is an admin of that organization, users will see both “View Product in Organization Library” and “View Product Settings in Management”.
• Display Application name - Previously, the application name was not displayed when a reviewer was assigned an application review.  Now the title of the application is visible.

Turning off Teacher Access to LearnCommunity Library

Some organizations have asked that teachers can be prevented from requesting products that they find in the LearnCommunity Library.  They would like to restrict search results to not include products only in the LearnCommunity Library.

Now Admins can use Settings>Access Controls to activate a setting under Data Sharing with Educators. Selecting ‘No, block for Educators’ would hide LearnCommunity from the org drop down and exclude from search results.

Updates to the Product Overview Page

This update impacts the following pages:

• Management>Products
• The LearnCommunity Library
• The Organization Library

To support customers in finding and sharing information more quickly and clearly, information is presented in new ways:

• The company name is now listed under the Product name
• Grade, Request and Compare are now under a kabob menu in the top right corner
• Accessibility links, terms of service links and privacy policy links are now located near Website link
• Accessibility links will include the accessibility description text as a hover note
• Badges and 3rd party data are now housed on the ride sidebar for increased visibility