Check in on Checkpoints

[SamGarza1]

Hello Instructure Community,

We're excited to share an important update regarding the release of our eagerly awaited feature, Discussion Checkpoints. Your enthusiasm for this addition has been incredibly motivating, and we sincerely appreciate your continued patience as we navigate the development process.

As you know, the journey to bring checkpointed discussions to life has been both exciting and complex. Checkpointed discussions require modifications in a variety of locations throughout Canvas requiring coordination across multiple teams. As development progressed, it was clear that we needed to modify the initial implementation to handle unexpected edge cases to allow for a better overall user experience. Our goal is to ensure the feature we ship meets your needs and doesn’t introduce new pain points.

Due to these complexities, we've made the tough decision to delay the release of Discussion Checkpoints by one more quarter. We now anticipate launching this feature at the end of Q3 2024. While we understand this news may be disappointing, we are confident that this additional time will allow us to provide a more polished and user-friendly experience.

We are committed to keeping you informed throughout this process. As soon as we make further progress, we will share another update along with some preview videos to give you a glimpse of the new feature.

Thank you once again for your patience and ongoing support. The public roadmap will be updated soon to reflect this delay. 

[rpsloan]

@SamGarza1 If this does launch end of Q3 2024, that would be end of September, possibly early October? Would this be automatically enabled when launched? How would it affect existing discussion boards? My concern would be it becoming available mid-semester and making changes to active discussion boards.

[james_whalley]

@SamGarza1 With a later launch, does this mean there might be a chance that checkpoints on other things (Assignments, etc.) might come out alongside Discussion Checkpoints?

[sheba_lo]

I'm glad it's coming, albeit more than a decade late for a lot of us. Unfortunately,  I think at this late stage, Canvas discussions will soon be obsolete because of widespread use of AI. 

[mwolfenstein]

@SamGarza1 we definitely appreciate the update. I need to say though that based on the previous planned release date of this feature in relation to the enforcement date, those of us in charge of messaging our constituents about Canvas have largely been emphasizing that checkpoints would be available before the enforcement date, and that's been pretty essential in buying good will from many faculty when there are other aspects of the redesign that as you know are creating workflow issues for faculty users. I know that Instructure regards checkpoints as a separate feature from the redesign in general, but as I've noted before checkpoints were included in the list of new features for the redesign when it was announced at CanvasCon in 2021, and it was included as one of the features in the development roadmap when the project kicked off with this community as well. Users regard checkpoints as an essential feature of the redesign, and having the enforcement date happen before this feature is ready is more than a little problematic.

I'm comfortable speaking from the customer side here when I say that from our perspective, the enforcement date is relatively arbitrary and we don't really see why it can't be pushed back given the change in the timeline for feature development. Is there some massive cost that we as users are unaware of to continuing to keep the redesign as a feature option that necessitates enforcing it next month?

[DanBurgess]

Thanks for the update.

Might be a good idea to update the Canvas Roadmap to reflect this change. Because the roadmap has been diligently updated for a good long period of time now, we have come to rely on it as a reliable source of what to expect. Wouldn't want folks to start suspecting its accuracy based on this change in the delivery time of Checkpoints not being reflected in the roadmap community space. 

[kmoore2431]

I agree, please update the Canvas Roadmap to reflect this. I also agree with @mwolfenstein, I have not been given a good reason as to why the enforcement date can't be pushed back? It seems like the only reason this is being forced on is because they say so rather than any real reason. 

I have had to do alot of digging to find answers to questions (like this one). It seems like these updates are sometimes not easy to find or maybe I'm just not navigating the community correctly. Anyone else run into this?