Q2 is upon us already! Time to take a look at what I think are the best enhancements, from bigger new additions to the smaller stuff that can still make the LMS experience more efficient.
Learning Accomplishments
This is definitely one of the bigger enhancements being rolled out this quarter. Learners will be able to find topics that are interesting to them and set goals for completing courses in that topic. If they are interested in learning Microsoft Office, for example, they can set a goal of completing two courses a month, and then track their progress towards that goal. Included are graphical reports that show their progress.
I'm excited about this feature, especially because it encourages a "pull" learning experience within a company, instead of a "push". Learners can really dive in and challenge themselves to learn a topic they are interested in. It encourages a company culture that has their employees driving learning, rather than admins forcing it upon them.
Adding Images to Questions and Answers in Question Library
This may seem like a smaller enhancement to a developing tool, but it's worth recognizing how far evaluations in the LMS has come in the last 1-2 years. I have seen so many clients (and myself) struggle with using the legacy PQE. So much time was spent trying to align text and images in the tool, just to have it publish completely wrong.
When the quiz tool was announced, it was certainly a welcome relief. The new UI proved to be much more intuitive and admins could create quick hit evaluations relatively easy. However, the quiz tool lacked MUCH of the functionality of exams. Things like pooling questions, question variants, and proctoring could not be done.
In this quarter, admins can start adding images to questions in the new library tool, bringing it closer to parity with the legacy editor. So ready to push the new exams out to your users? Not so fast, you'll still have to wait until Q3 to do that. However, you can begin building your library and thinking about your migration of existing questions to your new tool.
As an added bonus - quizzes will be getting images in Q3 too!
Instructor Custom Roster Printing
This one may seem small but will actually have a big impact on the business processes of my clients. Previous to this enhancement, instructors were stuck with printing out the standard roster report. What made it more burdensome did not even have the choice of hiding or showing user IDs - they were stuck with having them hidden.This made the feature essentially worthless to some clients who absolutely needed that on roster information.
This meant that they either needed to have an administrator print it out for them, or create admin accounts for instructors to do this themselves. We now have a quick and easy way for instructors to print rosters from their BizX page that is customized to their company's specifications.
Custom Tile for Target Audience
So many times, when discussing landing page layouts, I have heard clients say "Oh, it would be nice to use custom tiles, but I don't think we want to get into using organizations". Finally, those days are over. Custom tiles can now leverage groups instead of organizations, so that admins can target specific groups based simply on user feed data. With this power, admins can make tiles that target either large swaths of the company or extremely specific users.
Admins simply need to create assignment profiles that capture users and put them into groups. Those groups can then be added to custom tiles. What's great though is that with assignment profiles, you can capture groups from across the company that wouldn't necessarily fall under the same organization umbrella. This allows you to manage just one tile where otherwise you would need to create multiple.
New Notification Editor Features
Like evaluations, notifications are something that have come a long way in the last two years. Not too long ago, admins were using a combination of html, syntax tags, and system labels to write out their notifications. Along came the notification editor, which provided a clear and easy way to create notifications within a UI. It really went a long way in making the experience for admins much easier, although it was not without it's own hiccups.
One of the more painful parts of making a notification was stylizing the text. You would highlight the entire message, change the text, only to have the syntax tag remain the same. Getting the syntax tag to change fonts required a lot of highlighting the tag and trying to force it to change, until suddenly, it clicked. But now these is a new feature that is solely focused on just changing the font of the syntax tags. Some of my clients have already begun updating their fonts in stage in anticipation of this update.
See you all in Q3!
