We are excited to share the Prioritized Themes that our Product and Engineering team has committed to work on!
Without further ado, here are the themes that we’ve committed to delivering on within the next 6 months:
- Improved rubric creation and usability
- Rubrics are a powerful assessment tool that is used by many of our users. The UI/UX improvements to rubrics come up frequently on customer calls and this was the top-voted theme!
- Improve quiz analysis through robust reporting
- Quiz reports are key components that help our users understand outcomes and student performance. Reporting should be responsive, easy to manipulate, downloadable, and include the data necessary to help teachers and administrators make sound decisions on effectiveness and mastery. We were not surprised to see this as a top-voted theme, as we have heard from many customers that this level of reporting is essential in their day to day.
- Improve the user experience with discussions to provide for more meaningful discourse among course participants
- Improving the user experience with discussions continues to be one of the top requests among our users as well as a major UX/UI pain point. In addition to being ranked within the top 3 themes in this round of voting, internal team members report that questions about the redesign and missing functionality that requires users to partner with 3rd party vendors are topics on nearly every client call with users in Higher Education and regions outside of North America. We have the opportunity to improve the UX/UI and ensure that meaningful discussions can be had.
- Enable differentiated learning at scale
- Educators want a simple way to allocate content to specific learners or groups of learners so that they can provide content that’s relative to their personal learning journey. We continue to hear from our users that they want to provide high quality, personalized experiences, but are pressed for time and lack the flexibility needed to effectively differentiate.
How were Prioritized Themes selected?
As a reminder, between April 3 and April 28, 1,019 Community members voted on 12 themes. Based on these votes, the Instructure team took the past few weeks to thoughtfully review and research the themes, work together to understand the complexity and capacity, as well as the alignment with our overall vision and strategy. We also took into consideration which themes would be feasible for our team to take on based on resourcing. Based on these factors, we have selected 4 themes.
What does it mean for a theme to be prioritized?
This means that our team is committed to delivering on the value of the theme over the next 6 months. It is important to note that we will not address every idea tagged to the themes. As we work through the discovery, definition and delivery of these themes, our team will use the Prioritized Theme discussion area to pose questions to the Community, provide updates on progress, and involve you in the process.
What happens to the themes that aren’t selected?
Although we aren’t about to tackle all of your fantastic ideas, the themes that weren’t selected will get a chance to be voted on again in our next voting cycle in late 2023 (Oct - Dec timeframe).
We know that transparency into our decision-making is incredibly important to the Community. For each theme that was not prioritized, we will provide the context within the theme about why it was not selected.
Does this mean that we will only work on the Prioritized Themes?
No! Our new process has enabled our teams to have even greater insights into the challenges and areas that are important to Community members. Throughout the year, you will see our team make progress on individual ideas or aspects of various themes. We will continue to call these out in our release notes as we make progress.
Is anything going to change about this process moving forward?
Thank you to all that provided feedback via the feedback form! We have read each response and appreciate your feedback!
A couple of things will be updated moving forward:
- Bite-sized themes: a shared sentiment from the Community and from our team is that some themes were too broad, this will change moving forward. Our team is going to be intentional on ensuring that themes are more “bite-sized” to ensure that they 1) are easily understood and 2) are themes that we could deliver on holistically in a 6-month timeframe if prioritized.
- Smaller issues not being addressed: with our new review process, there is a commitment from our team to review every idea submitted from the Community. This enables our teams to have greater insights and more easily incorporate the “small” issues organically into our development process. We will continue to call these out in release notes and you will be able to see all ideas “In Development” or “Completed”.
Our team will continue to look at ways and foster opportunities for collaboration and partnership between Community members.
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