Assignment Submission / Assignment Center Go-Live

Michael Morrissette

Hello Everyone -

I just wanted to take a moment and say ‘thank you’ for participating in this EAP. On 12/05, we'll be allowing schools to opt into these new features when it best suits their timeline. I'll outline some of the features coming on 12/05, and some features that you'll see coming shortly after the new year. These are all an amalgamation of feedback from you, your faculty, and your students and I greatly appreciate the feedback you all have been able to provide.

Activate New Features

You all won't have to worry about this since your experience is already turned on, but through your feedback we were able to add a new option for schools to opt into this feature. This will be available beginning 12/05. This will be accessible in Core > Settings > Activate new features. it allows schools to pop into the new experience when they're ready. Coupled with this, we are also announcing that the old Assignment center experience will be leaving the product sometime during the summer of 2024.

Resubmit

When it comes to resubmitting an assignment, teachers will now have more information at their finger tips to better understand when a student triggers the resubmission process.

In their Assignment Evaluation Screen, teachers will now have a new icon display, a pencil in a blue background. We have also updated the verbiage teachers see in the Submitted files box to also reinforce that the student is in a resubmit state. This icon signals that the student is in a resubmit state and needs to submit the assignment again before the changes can be visible to the teacher. On 12/05, this will specifically be visible from the teachers Assignment Center view, but this icon will be made available in the Gradebook in a future release.

Students will also now have a visual indication that their assignment needs to be resubmitted.

Calendar Improvements

One update coming to the Calendar version has to do with seeing the status of an assignment. We know that students ‘feel good’ when they see green-across-the-board when looking at their calendar view of the Assignment center. We'll be adding a background color that corresponds with the assignment's status. Hopefully this allows students to more easily see the status of their assignments without having to focus on the status icon.

We also know that teachers sometimes write a lot of information in the title of their assignments. In the Week and Day view, the event square isn't responsive, so we'll be making the default size of the square a little larger to better accommodate those longer assignment titles.

Better Support for Special Characters

We're adding even more support for special characters in places on the assignment page. On 12/05, Downloads added to assignments will now support special characters. This update impacts more than just the assignment screen, however. Any place in the software that uses Download Categories will be getting the same treatment. This is a very big change, so we'll be monitoring this, if it goes according to plan, we'll update the Links Category to support the same after the new year.

Misc. Enhancements

We also have been able to add a couple small things to make lives a little easier. For example, the Text box students use when submitting assignments now has an auto-save built into it. We will also have the ability for students to add tasks for themselves by clicking into the cell of a day on the Calendar. Students will also be able to filter on “Major” assignments.

We'll always be looking for more feedback on this feature, and hope to build more into this in the coming months. Thank you again for all of your participation, it has truly been very helpful.

-Mike