It’s Here: Selected Themes are Open for Voting

[TaraGoldman]

12 Themes are officially in “Open Voting” to the Community from today, April 3rd to April 28th. Over the past month, our team has been reviewing all of the themes as part of our quarterly planning and selected these themes as they:

• Address areas that have been met with the greater controversy or pain expressed from our users
• Align with the shifts taking place within the educational landscape, such as competency-based education and student-driven learning 
• Are achievable and attainable by our team to deliver based on domain knowledge and capacity if prioritized by the Community

During the voting window, Community members are encouraged to:

• Ask questions to our team or post comments on the Open for Voting themes to build a case for why others should vote for the theme (put those high school debate skills to work!)
• Vote on themes that speak to the problems or areas that, if addressed, would bring the most value to you and your organization
• Remember that the themes do not represent how we will solve the problem; that will be determined once it is prioritized as our team goes through discovery and planning. 
• As prioritized themes move through discovery, we may discover that not all ideas can be addressed. Our team will update the theme accordingly and notify the Community.
• Subscribe to themes that you have voted on or are interested in so you can easily follow new activity, including comments or change in status.
• To learn more about how to contribute to this stage of the Ideas & Themes process, please refer to the How do I participate with themes? Community guide.

At the end of the voting period, our team will review the votes and comments to select which themes move to “prioritized” - meaning our team commits to developing solutions that solve that particular theme’s needs and will engage the community throughout the development process.

We’ve Already Released 11 Quick Win Community Submitted Ideas

One of the benefits of our new review process and grouping of ideas was that it enabled our team to more easily review all the Community requests. We organically identified a few individual ideas that would deliver value, and were small enough efforts, that we just went ahead and developed 11 of your Community submitted ideas (see list below) that have already been released.

• Released to Beta: Grade by Question addresses the following ideas:
  • [New Quizzes] Simple navigation to specific questions in Speedgrader
  • [New Quizzes] easily navigate to manually graded questions
  • [New Quizzes] Moving from one Question to Another

• Released to Production
  • Share Item Bank to Current Course Checkbox [New Quizzes] Item banks created within a course should be automatically added to the course
  • File Summary Description in Notifications: [Notifications] Show location of recently added files in Notifications
  • Sort by Student's First Name in Gradebook
  • Easily Link to Newly Created Course
  • Submit on behalf of Student
  • [Studio] Embed Canvas Studio videos that start from a specific time
  • [Studio] Enable students to download Studio transcripts
  • [Studio] Transcript built into Studio player

Please continue to provide your feedback via our feedback form as collecting feedback in a structured way results in greater insights. Once we get through a full cycle of voting and prioritization, we will determine what to change, if needed.

Edited 2023.04.06 to include Ideas featured in the recent Studio release.

[KaraFinch]

Can anyone vote? I've signed in and I can see how many votes each theme received, but when trying to click on the vote icon from this guide, nothing appears to happen.

[IanGoh]

I’ve been going into the particular theme, then using the kudo to vote

 

[CarolynCardwell]

@KaraFinchI couldn't get the instructions to work for me either.  In discussion with the support team I found out that one can click on the individual theme and vote from there.  That voting process does work for me.  Give that a try.

[KaraFinch]

Thank you both. However, when I view the individual theme, I'm seeing a "This widget could not be displayed" message. I've tried clearing my cache and using different browsers (firefox/chrome/safari)

Oddly enough I'm also being told I don't have permissions to upload images when I post

I'll reach out to support

[hesspe]

@TaraGoldman 

Could you provide some insight into the relationship between Themes development, which look for the most part like major projects, and the Quick Wins you reference?  At our school we have identified 26 "Quick Wins" some or most of which are listed under one of the 68 Themes.  Is there a way to elevate these even if they are not within the 12 Themes currently open for voting?  Below are some examples, many of which we have been actively waiting for for ten years:

Allow teachers to assign a separate due date for Peer Reviews

Allow Teachers to sort and filter the People list by section. 

Allow users to expand/collapse announcements on the Home and Announcements page so that they can scroll through all announcements and view the full text. 

Allow Teachers to add columns to the gradebook without adding an assignment. 

Enable Teachers to use "+ Add" to add people after a course has been soft-concluded. 

Allow users to expand/collapse all modules to Titles only with one click. 

On Settings page make the options under the “more options" always visible to Teachers

Warn Teachers when they try to set up a group discussion without creating groups.

Allow Test Student to be added to a group

Option to not send an invitation (and not to tag the enrollment as pending) when using "+ Add" 

Make fields where date and time are entered wide enough for both date and time to be visible without scrolling. 

Leave Points in assignments indeterminate with a warning if teacher fails to specify a point value.

Add permission that would allo TAs to grade student submissions without having access to gradebook. 

Allow people to edit their display name but not their full or sortable names. 

[mbmacdonald]

Hi, I really appreciate the effort that has been made with Canvas ideas. I understand the system was disorganized before, and hopefully this attempt to organize and streamline ideas will lead to a better experience for users and engineers.

But I have to say that I am very very disappointed that this theme was not chosen: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Themes/Build-dynamic-question-types/idi-p/555187 

This theme has 39(!!!) referenced ideas which are all very important concrete items that address actual functionality of crucial course mechanics. Most of the suggestions in this theme basically boil down to "Without this function, I cannot use New Quizzes." I find myself on a daily basis having to explain to faculty that "no, that is not possible in New Quizzes." Without some hope that these issues  are going to be addressed, I really don't feel good about continuing to recommend this feature.

[Jody Sailor (jsailor)]

Hi, @hesspe, with our updated process, it enables our teams to review and have an understanding of each incoming idea. As our teams look at our priorities combined with capacity, we are able to flag certain inbound ideas that we believe we could tackle based on feasibility (complexity, impact on overall experience, capacity, etc). Some of the things you mentioned might seem like quick wins on the surface but in practice are much more complicated, such as 'separate due dates for peer reviews' which requires updating multiple workflows and connected components. 

In addition to ensuring that all ideas are reviewed, another benefit to this new process is that it helps product managers to see the bigger picture within a theme and discover how we can best move things forward to achieve the outcomes needed by those using our platform. 

[hesspe]

Thank you for replying to my post.  

I realize what a complex process it is to gather and prioritize feedback from a large and diverse customer base.  It's a task that could make your head explode, and I give you credit for undertaking it.

I understand that what seems like a quick win to a casual observer might be complicated to implement.  Thank you for pointing that out for the Peer Review suggestion. I would like the same sort of information about each of the items on my list.  Without that, I'm still inclined, perhaps mistakenly, to see them as easy wins, simply being ignored.  When a feature is deemed difficult to implement OR has been considered and rejected for cause it would be very helpful to me in my interactions with my own community if I could easily go a single database to find that out.  Bad news is better than no news.  

Along the same lines, I hope you will continue to provide information as the Themes process progresses and also continue to work on quick wins.  

The 12 voting Themes so far have received 2548 votes in total.  That seems like a small number for a large customer base, but I guess we and you have to hope it will be a valid sample. 

Last thing, loosely related:

The theme "Improve the user experience with discussions to provide for more meaningful discourse among course participants" is very important to my community, but its presence is perplexing.  I thought that was already in progress, though many, including me, are not happy with the results so far.  What does it mean that it is still on the voting list?

[JenniferJWhite]

Hello!

My one concern about voting for these themes is how/whether the votes will be weighted.  There are themes geared more towards end users such as teachers (e.g., a theme that essentially covers "improvements to discussions"), and there are MANY of these folks voting.  However, there are themes geared only towards Canvas or Catalog admins, which will have import for far fewer voters. If the numbers of votes will be a major driver of which themes are addressed, then the issues that are important to Canvas or Catalog admins won't get much attention.

I'm sure Instructure would like to address issues that affect a large number of users (to do the most good for the most users), but the admin issues are very important -- just to a necessarily smaller group of people. I worry that the back-end concerns will be overshadowed and neglected, simply because there are fewer folks here voting that are concerned about back-end issues. (If I'm not acurate in reading how the theme voting is supposed to work, please correct me!)

[JamesSekcienski]

@JenniferJWhite I have been wondering the same thing about how they plan to account for this.  I've also been wondering just how much impact the votes in general have on which themes are prioritized as they are not the only factor considered when determining which themes are prioritized.

"Selection of Prioritized themes is based on Community votes during the voting window, alignment to other development priorities, delivery schedule, and team capacity. Instructure selects Prioritized themes that have the highest value among our users." https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Community/How-do-Ideas-and-Themes-work-in-the-Instructure-Communi... 

[jsowalsk]

@JenniferJWhite To back up your point, how are the ideas under these themes going to be prioritized so more ideas that end-users such as admins want can be implemented? As you can see there are a ton of ideas under each theme. Will the prioritized ideas that are picked be publically announced?

[JenniferJWhite]

Right, @JamesSekcienski -- that last bit is the greatest concern:  "Instructure selects Prioritized themes that have the highest value among our users."  It does seem that just the number of votes is ultimately driving the selections by Instructure..

[JamesSekcienski]

@hesspe I agree that there are more quick win ideas that would be nice to see especially since so many themes were left out of consideration for prioritization.  It is also sad to see there were some good ideas submitted in the old process that weren't transferred in the new process that weren't even given a chance with this new process for consideration by the community.

I see you mentioned the number of votes as being relatively low, but I'm even more surprised by how low the number of comments are on each theme.  I'm not sure how people are supposed to argue for or against a theme when it is easy to vote without even looking at the comments and there are so few people engaging in the discussion.  If the number of themes that are available for voting remain low like this in the future, it would be interesting to see if they would consider ranked choice voting in the future and to be able to list "not applicable" for themes that don't affect your institution (ex: the catalog theme doesn't affect me since we don't use catalog).

As for the discussions theme, this might be how they are determining if work continues on the discussion board redesign project.  If you look at the discussions in the interest group for the discussion board redesign, the dev team that was working on it was removed from the project as Instructure re-evaluated its priorities.  Can someone from Instructure confirm or deny if that theme is being used to determine if work continues on the discussion board redesign project?  If that theme isn't being used for it, do you have any information on when development will continue on that project?

[JamesSekcienski]

@jsowalsk I was also wondering that when they first announced this considering you may only be voting for a theme because you hope a certain idea within that theme gets developed.  However, I was told that the solutions they develop will be based on the theme not the ideas, so there is no guarantee that an idea will be implemented even if a theme is prioritized.  Thus it will be very important when discussions open on prioritized themes to make your voice heard for the idea(s) that is most important to you in hopes they will integrate it as part of the solution they develop.  Here is what they have listed in the guide about it: 

"When we deliver on prioritized themes, our focus is on solving the problem with the best solution we have identified. Due to this, the end solution and deliverable may be different from solutions or specific asks in the original ideas. If the problem of an idea mapped to a prioritized theme is not solved in our end solution, we will re-map the idea to a different theme (existing, new or extension of the current theme if the scope was deemed too big). The theme would go back through the process." https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Community/How-do-Ideas-and-Themes-work-in-the-Instructure-Communi... 

@JenniferJWhite Since it says "value" rather than "votes", I would expect more than the number of votes per theme to determine the "value" of a theme.  Also, they mentioned above that they will be reviewing votes AND comments to determine what is prioritized.  So if there is a theme you strongly believe needs to be selected, I would recommend voting AND commenting on that theme to share why you believe it is important as it may help increase its value.

[jsowalsk]

@JamesSekcienski I did what you said and hoping for the best: https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Canvas-Themes/Improved-flexibility-in-Catalog-listing-management-...

[Code-with-Ski]

@hesspe 

I see you asked about more details on the other ideas you consider to be quick wins.  Hopefully someone from Instructure could provide more insight, but here is some of what I can tell related to these ideas based on my own experience:

• Allow Teachers to sort and filter the People list by section.
  • People page currently uses lazy loading to load in users.  You may not even really notice this unless you are in a large class
  • To load in users, it uses the "List users in course" endpoint that doesn't currently support filtering or sorting by sections.
  • To continue supporting lazy loading and efficient loading, this would likely require an update to the API endpoint.
  • They would also need to determine how to sort when users are in multiple sections and/or change the current display to put each enrollment for a user in separate rows
• Allow users to expand/collapse announcements on the Home and Announcements page so that they can scroll through all announcements and view the full text.
  • Considering announcements could vary widely in length and formatting, there might be concerns about ensuring the formatting would display properly in this area.
  • Some institutions may also prefer that users view the full announcement on its own page to ensure the formatting is properly displayed and to encourage reading the comments.  Thus, this might be something they prefer to leave for community discussion first.  If it could be set-up as a course setting, this might be nice feature that could be optionally enabled.
  • Also, if they were to enable this, they would need to determine if it should count as reading the announcement when they view the full announcement on the Home/Announcements page.  Currently, the read status of an announcement is updated when viewing the full announcement on its own page.
• Allow Teachers to add columns to the gradebook without adding an assignment.
  • I'm curious what you would need to add columns to the gradebook to do that wouldn't be an assignment.
  • Since the gradebook is built on assignments, it would be a significant change to introduce new columns to a gradebook that aren't an assignment, especially if they are meant to affect the grade.  This also introduces potential issues if a course uses weighted assignment groups.
• Enable Teachers to use "+ Add" to add people after a course has been soft-concluded.
  • This has been highly requested among admins based on conversations in the Canvas Community.
  • Since the API doesn't support this behavior, it seems like something they need to update permissions, workflows, and the API to accommodate.
• Allow users to expand/collapse all modules to Titles only with one click.
  • This appears to already be a feature.
• On Settings page make the options under the “more options" always visible to Teachers
  • I have wondered why they hide some of the settings within this more options area considering the settings page already requires scrolling through other settings that are also usually set and forget.
  • There are some settings hidden in there that I didn't notice when first using Canvas that I would have liked to review before the course started rather than realizing I wanted to change the setting when students had access to something I didn't want them to have access to.
  • This seems like it could be a "quick win", but perhaps they have more of a reason that these are hidden and/or others may prefer it to stay hidden.
  • This seems like something you could consider making a theme modification to handle showing by default to teachers.
• Warn Teachers when they try to set up a group discussion without creating groups.
  • This seems like a reasonable idea for a "quick win" if it is just a warning message
  • Considering a group discussion currently shows a message without any links to a group when there are no groups, it seems like it wouldn't be unreasonable to modify this message to look like a warning when there aren't any groups.  However, there may be something I'm not considering.
  • This might be something you could experiment with making a theme modification to handle
• Allow Test Student to be added to a group
  • It seems that Test Student was created with specific use cases in mind when it was originally designed.
  • To extend it to also be used within a group would likely require significant changes to workflows and how Test Student users are created/managed
• Option to not send an invitation (and not to tag the enrollment as pending) when using "+ Add"
  • There is currently support for this through the API for enrolling users
  • If Instructure were to add additional inputs to the GUI and event handling for these, it could provide this functionality.
  • Considering this would be change to current behavior they may want to keep this as something to receive community feedback. 
    • This might be something some institutions would want to keep the same and/or only allow certain users access to this. 
    • If that is the case, it may require an update to permissions to handle this.
• Make fields where date and time are entered wide enough for both date and time to be visible without scrolling.
  • This seems like something that would be good to address as a "quick win"
  • There may be something I'm not considering, but it seems like something that would only need an update on the front-end.
  • You may be able to create a theme modification to fix this for your university until it is addressed by Canvas
• Leave Points in assignments indeterminate with a warning if teacher fails to specify a point value.
  • Leaving the points indeterminate would likely cause unexpected errors in the system.
  • This may also require updates to the API if they want to provide consistent behavior with the GUI, which could then also affect other workflows and integrations.
  • This also seems like an idea that users may not agree on how it should be implemented, so they may not want to push this as a "quick win" idea
  • However, providing a warning if the points aren't set makes sense.
• Add permission that would allow TAs to grade student submissions without having access to gradebook.
  • I'm curious why you would want to provide a user with access to grade assignments, but not to see the gradebook.
  • As noted in this request, it would require a change in permissions, which have to be carefully tested to ensure it doesn't break existing workflows and/or integrations.
• Allow people to edit their display name but not their full or sortable names.
  • This would likely require a more granular change in permissions since being able to edit their name is currently all within one permission.
  • I believe some people in the community have shared about making theme edits to try to disable editing the other name fields, but that doesn't fully solve this problem.

[hesspe]

C-W-S, I really appreciated your thoughtful, direcgt, and detailed summary.  I'm going to copy it and keep it for reference.  Instructure could use someone like you to provide this sort of information in response to other serious enhancement suggestions.  It's a plus that they entertain input from the community, but from a customer relations perspective, but they lose much of the benefit if there is no- or only a perfunctory response  

[Code-with-Ski]

@hesspe 

You're welcome!  I'm glad my perspective on the ideas helped you.  Since I'm not an Instructure employee, I'm sure there are other factors to consider with these ideas that I'm not aware of and potentially differing opinions on things stated above.  Hopefully someone from Instructure can provide more insight for anything that is incorrect or they would like to add more detail too.

It would be nice if they restored the ability to comment on ideas so Community members could discuss them with each other.  People used to be able to share useful work-arounds and support each other while waiting for Instructure to consider implementing an idea.