TL;DR: 

The full educator release of Studio’s Pages & Resources experience brings simplified configuration to a long list of course applications including discussions (- previously covered). App Configuration for educators is a top 15 platform gap according to our partners, and through these changes, we have eliminated many distributed and hard-to-author advanced settings.

TL;UseEmoji:

Release date: 10/25/21

Product owner: Marco Morales (Deactivated)

What is it? 

A centralized view into the app status and configuration options for all course tools. Each tool can now be configured using similar patterns in the same place, all built using Paragon components in our new course authoring MFE.

• Discussion configuration details have been detailed before, if you are interested check out this post. Since our last update, we have made major improvements to how educators configure blackout dates, using new data and time fields that other authoring tools may emulate in the future.

• The Progress, Wiki, Calculator, and Notes tools can now be enabled or disabled easily, replacing 5 advanced settings for these tools.

• Custom Pages & Textbooks link to their existing configuration pages, simplifying authoring navigation by moving these 2 tools to be within the Page & Resources view.

• Proctoring settings have been improved by the Cosmonauts team, built into this new Page & Resources area in anticipation of its release.

• Teams have a simplified configuration area that helps educators create groups of teams, replacing a difficult JSON formatted advanced setting. This configuration area also adds in-context messaging and edge case validation, patterns we hope to emulate in additional configuration areas in the future.

  • Note: Teams will be enabled separately later this week once we have reviewed some documentation and rollout details. All other changes are live on production currently.

Key talking points for customers:

Who will notice the change, and where (LMS/Studio)?

These changes will be in Studio, accessible in the Content dropdown within a course as the Page & Resources view.

Is there anything a user needs to do to enable the feature? 

Detailed documentation for educators is published to explain how to enable and configure each of these tools in more detail.

How does it connect to existing or future features?

This milestone wraps up the infrastructure and educator app configuration phase of the Discussions blended project. Next up is an educator preview of our new discussion experience, which will be covered in future posts. Additional improvements to this educator configuration experience are expected in Q3 after gathering feedback and improvement suggestions based on this release as well (to be covered in milestones v1.14 / v1.15 in the Discussions effort).

Results: 

After release, we plan to monitor partner feedback and conduct a platform map ratings exercise in early January to assess the impact of these and other educator-facing changes since our last ratings assessment in May 2021.

Link(s) to additional details: Educator documentation link coming soon!

Credits: 
Thanks to the Infinity Squad ( Awais Jibran (Deactivated) , Awais Ansari , Asad Azam , Mehak Nasir (Deactivated) , Ahtisham Shahid, Saad Yousaf ) for their efforts as part of the BD-38 Blended effort on Discussions to get these changes live for our educators.

Thanks to Jon F for all the UX definition and review work to get all these experience improvements into this release.

Additionally, the Cosmonauts team (Bianca Severino , Simon Chen ) built the Proctored settings area, readying their changes before we were even able to get the rest ready for educators. We are excited to see these improvements launching alongside the other course applications.