@MichaelMorrissette - Is it possible to allow students a Setting option to show an indicator for the time period between when an assignment is Assigned and when it is Due? This would replace the old 'Active' view that students used to have, and that teachers still have.

In my mind, I'm imagining something like a thin line that extends across multiple days on the calendar/grid view of the student Assignment Center. Something that is a visual indicator of an assignment with a future due date.

A teacher I just worked with commented, "The way it’s set up reduces the efficacy of the graphical display". He was lamenting the loss of the 'Active' view option for students, because now they cannot see assignments with future due dates without moving forward in time to find the actual due date.

@Michael Morrissette: I appreciate the update. Regarding the calendar view, I want to point out that the calendar tab (outside of the assignment center) still shows assignments stretching across from "assigned date" to "due date" (see image). The Assignment Center calendar only needs to show the assignment name as a link to the assignment details. The other data is not necessary in that view.

Furthermore, if a teacher assigns 40 assignments on the first day, then they should change the "assigned date" to reflect when each assignment would be active on the calendar. Your example of a teacher misusing the assignment center doesn't convince me that we should remove the functionality that existed last year.

Hi Everyone -

I just wanted to log a quick update on this and outline some additional options that will be coming that should address some of the feedback we're receiving.

The features outlined in my last post have almost all been deployed to live environments, with the exception of the new teacher-level setting for ensuring certain assignments do not go into an Overdue status. That feature will be in tomorrow's release (Sadly, it required some backend changes that stipulated a Tuesday release, rather than us being able to deploy continuously). I'll outline some of the problems we've heard and how we'll be going able resolving them.

Overdue assignments are difficult to manage

With tomorrow's release, teachers will have a new option when selecting how students submit assignments. They will now see 'On paper submission' as a new option. Selecting this will allow any assignment created with this submission method to go into an Overdue status once the Due Date/Time have passed. The idea is that the teacher isn't collecting submissions in the LMS but is still expecting something to be turned in. The other submission setting, 'No assignment submission', will no longer put assignments in an Overdue status and will be the default setting for all assignments created. Once the due time/time passes for assignments marked for no submission, the assignment will automatically move to a 'Completed' status and will completely bypass Overdue, requiring no intervention from the teacher or student.

Spacing in calendar view makes it difficult to navigate and see needed information

The calendar view is particularly tricky from a development standpoint because we allow formatting in assignment titles. Things like line breaks, bullets, and just the sheer number of characters allowed make creating a condensed view very challenging. With that said, we think we have some updates coming that will alleviate some of the visual difficulty students are having with that particular view. Mainly, we'll be making the event tiles larger and adding some additional bolding and spacing to help elements stand apart from one another. I've attached a prototype of this new view down below. If you have feedback on it, we'd love to hear it, so feel free to pass it along to me at michael.morrissette@blackbaud.com.

Students want an easy way to see "big" assignments that aren't due until later in the marking period

In the previous version of the assignment center, students had the ability to look at assignments from their assigned date to their due date, and this was known as 'active'. It would create an event tile that spanned the full length of that date duration and helped to act as reminder for students of assignments yet to come. While we know this view had value, we also heard a number of stories from students about how this view caused anxiety and was difficult to understand. For example, if a teacher assigned the majority of their work at the beginning of the marking period, students would sometimes see 30-40 active assignments for a single class on a given day. This caused a good amount of scrolling and hunting to find the desired assignments.

Instead, we're looking into alternative solutions when it comes to replacing the 'Active' view. Specifically, we're investigating the concept of allowing students to 'pin' assignments and house those pinned assignments in an easy, at-a-glance view. This should give the student more control and flexibility to see the assignments that matter most to them while ensuring we don't hit the same pitfalls of the previous 'Active' view. No prototype to share on this just yet, but it is something that we're actively investigating.

We have more small enhancements coming to the experience in the near future, so be on the lookout for our weekly What's New communications as we'll be noting our changes there.

Thank you again to all of you how have provided feedback thus far, and an especially big thank you to those who are helping to facilitate some student-led discovery sessions. As always, if you have feedback, feel free to reach out to michael.morrissette@blackbaud.com.

-Mike

FWIW, the students at my school are so frustrated that they figured out that they could still access the old assignment center surreptitiously and have been handing around the URL like cigarettes in the prison yard.

Agree with everything Seth said

So many of my students prefer the old assignment center. They like customizing colors but when the due date didn't default and now they can't look at assigned, they are very frustrated! It does have way too much text too!

@michael I would suggest that students should not have to adapt.

One of the big complaints that I'm hearing from students is that the new assignment center is less usable than the old assignment center for three core reasons (o, that they had shared this when it was still in EAP):

1. It is far too easy to click in the wrong place in an assignment bubble and open a link to the class instead of the assignment.

2. The text is noticeably smaller and less legible overall.

3. The information they need about the assignment is overwhelmed by metadata. They'd really like to see a preview of the assignment description more prominent.

Agreeing with Denise Woodward! The Calendar tab still shows assignments stretching from their assigned date to their due date. The Assignment Center calendar view should mirror this. Students need to see assignments during their entire "active" phase, not just on their due dates.

Students would like to be able to see the assigned date and due date when in calendar view. Previously an assignment showed up on the calendar from the day it was assigned until it was due and now it only appears on the due date. A toggle that allows students to pick between showing the entire assigned date range or just the date due on the calendar view would be helpful. Only showing the due date could lead to procrastination as students don't realize that a larger assignment is coming up and they should actively be working on it.

Hi Folks -

With the change to the new assignment experience, we anticipate that there will be some growing pains as students adapt to the new workflows and look.

With that said, we have a couple items queued to be worked on in the near future:

The filter pane toggle (Open vs Closed) will be 'sticky'.

• This should help reduce some of the visual clutter that the filter pane displays when first launching the page. Now the filters will be housed in the device's browser cache and will remain closed so long as that browser cache remains intact.

The name of the 'Major' filter will be changed to 'Only display Major assignments'.

• This should better represent what the filter is doing when selected.

Clicking on the Status of a Task will launch the Task edit modal

• This will ensure a similar workflow can be followed when changing the status of a task and an assignment.

An optional setting will be introduced to allow teachers to mark whether or not an assignment receives the 'Overdue' status once the due date/time has passed.

• This should save both teachers and students time by not having to manually change the status of assignments that the teacher is not collecting. We heard both students and teachers were being overwhelmed by the number of assignments that were displaying in the Overdue buckets, especially for assignments that acted more as 'Reminders' or 'Tasks' rather than things the student actually had to hand in.

In the list view, the assignment Assigned date/time will be an optional display.

• Displaying the Assigned Date/Time in the calendar view is a little tricky given the amount of space we get in each event tile. We'll be investigating optionally displaying assignments based on Assigned Date/Time, rather than Due Date/Time, in the future for the calendar view.

There are also some defects that we have queued to be resolved in the next couple of weeks. Be on the lookout in our 'What's New' communications to see when these enhancements and defect fixes go into our live environments.

In the meantime, if you are hearing any specific feedback from students about pain points they're experience, feel free send those directly to me at michael.morrissette@blackbaud.com

We'll be making updates to this module over the next couple of months and are very interested in seeing how we can better assist students in their assignment workflow.

-Mike