Get excited! Impact’s First Round of Ideas & Themes Voting!

[teryn_odom]

Hi everyone!

I hope that you are as excited about the voting window opening yesterday as I am! If you haven’t already read about the new Ideas & Themes area, it was launched in February of this past year and debuted by Canvas in the first round this past April. Now, Impact gets to participate in this current (October) round and to say that we are pumped is an understatement! To learn more about the current open window, in general, check out Mackenzie’s blog post.

But, let’s take a few minutes to talk about Impact’s Themes prioritized for voting! As you may have already seen, Impact currently has 6 Themes open for voting out of 19. (Canvas has 9 for reference.) While we would have loved to open them all, it’s just not realistic or feasible, so we wanted to prioritize those which:

1. align with what we’ve heard requested from you all the most based on product feedback sessions, emails, and/or conversations with our CSM Team
2. align to the future vision and strategy of Impact (which we are super stoked about!)
3. are not already on our updated roadmap (to be published very soon based on the set schedule across the Instructure Learning Platform).
4. haven’t been tackled yet (obviously 🙂)
5. we could realistically prioritize for discovery and potentially prioritize for work in the next six months 

For example, Accessibility Improvements is a Theme that wasn’t prioritized for voting. But, as you know, we’ve been tackling that head on over the past year and have just wrapped up that very large and very important bucket of work! We now have permanently established processes to design and develop at a higher standard to ensure that everything that we release meets WCAG 2.1 AA compliance requirements

LTI Reporting and Monitoring is another Theme that wasn’t prioritized for voting. In its case, it wasn’t prioritized because it is already prioritized, is on our roadmap (again, to be updated very soon), and we wanted to gain direct feedback on things that aren’t (yet).

Another example of a Theme not included for voting is SSO integration. We are actively working on deeper integration with Canvas (to be released this quarter) and will be streamlining authentication as part of that work. Stay tuned for more details on that very soon!

We truly love all of the Ideas that you have submitted and want you to know that they will persist in the Community for future rounds of voting if they aren’t prioritized for work this time. If you feel strongly that we should have prioritized something else over one that was chosen for voting, we’d love to hear from you! Leave a comment below and tell us which Theme you feel should have been included vs. one that was chosen and why! Don’t despair though… another round of voting will happen ~April 2024 and voting will be a biannual event moving forward, so we will continually be looking to you all for Ideas and Themes submissions, then voting for what’s been suggested twice a year!