"Back to School 2016"

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"Back to School 2016"

This summer we are releasing a range of improvements to itslearning which will be ready for Back to School 2016. This document contains detailed information about the changes – and background information for the enhancements – which will provide a better user experience for all.

The changes fall into two categories:

• Changes for all customers: A new, refreshed design with several new and improved features/tools.

• Changes for new customers and existing customers who choose them: The New

itslearning experience – a brand new navigation and user experience focusing on getting the right information when it is needed.

We follow a development process that is agile and focuses on quality and user needs instead of specific timelines. The features described in this document are subject to change. If this

happens we will update customers through the usual channels.

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1. Overview and Release Timeline

From Back to School 2016 we will give all our customers a better experience in itslearning, through a combination of a design refresh and improved tools. The main improvements are:

1. A new visual design based on our design philosophy.

2. A new Global menu to make it easier to get to important information.

3. A new Instant Message System to all customer (unless the customer has opted out- find out more from your local support representatives).

4. New Bulletin Boards and Information Stream to all.

5. New Your Students view.

6. Redesigned Profile Card.

7. New Library user experience – better searching and improved experience all around.

8. We are updating the native apps to reflect the enhancements across our platform.

9. The early learner interface will be discontinued and existing course content migrated.

These changes will be introduced to all our customers starting in July 2016, according to the timeline described below.

Change Target Date Notes

Release of new visual design for all itslearning

July 2^nd Released to all customers at the same time.

Main release of feature changes (Profile Card, Your Students, Bulletin Board, Streams and more).

July 2^nd Does not include customers in France, UK, Germany and the Netherlands whose students are still in school.

Release of the new Library experience for all customers

July 16^th Released to all customers.

Improved Assignment tool for new customers

July 30^th Only for new customers, with existing customers and assignments being migrated later in the year.

Release of the new Message System

July 30^th Released to all customers.

Release of feature changes to remaining customers

July 30^th Update to remaining customers and customers in France, UK, Germany and the Netherlands.

Native app update August

Please note that we have a staggered release process where quality is more important than specific dates, so some customers may not be updated on these exact dates. For most customers, these are start dates and the update will follow soon thereafter.

These dates represent the major releases of the new features. We will continue to improve and update these features afterward. We will communicate these improvements through the usual release process channels.

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2. Changes for all our Customers

A Visual Design Improvement

We’re upgrading the way itslearning looks for all our existing customers. In essence, this change is all about introducing a clearer, more visually appealing look-and-feel which will help our users work more efficiently in itslearning. We are retaining the key features of the platform, while making many small improvements to help users get more from itslearning.

Image 1: A screenshot of the new design for existing customers.

The main changes introduced are:

• A more visually pleasing colour scheme, which also helps the users navigate by highlighting the actions they need to take.

• New and clearer icons in the tree-menu. A modern look + easy readability = improved usability.

• We’re switching to the Lato font. It is more readable on screen and across different devices.

• And lots of other smaller design choices which will simply make itslearning look better!

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Image 2: Screenshot illustrating the new icon set.

A New Global Menu

The Global Menu (the top menu) is getting a design refresh and some additional functionality:

• Improved and easier to read design for the main menu sections, the “Alerts” bell and the messages icon.

• A new drop down menu for courses and projects. This menu gives instant access to your most recently updated courses and projects across itslearning, along with a badge indicating the number of changes since your last visit. The old overview page for courses (and projects) is available through the “All courses” link.

• A new “Your Children” menu will give parents instant access to their children’s summary dashboards – no matter where they are in itslearning. Previously, these were only available from the old “Dashboard” left menu, now these are available everywhere.

Because the new course drop down in the Global Menu gives access to courses anywhere in itslearning, the old course content block on hierarchy dashboards is redundant and will be removed. Similarly, the “Favourites” dropdown is also redundant and will be removed.

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Image 3: The new Global Menu with the course drop down list.

Image 4: Access information about your children from the Global Menu.

Instant Messages: A New Communication Platform

Our new state of the art instant messaging system is one of several initiatives to strengthen itslearning as a communication platform. It makes it even easier for teachers to share

announcements and reminders, and for users to connect with their teachers and classmates.

We have built the system around the navigation concepts our users will be familiar from other systems, including social media. We’ve also made it much easier to send, read and respond, which lets our users get straight to the point and just communicate, not spend energy on the interface.

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Image 5: The instant message drop down.

Image 6: The full conversation view.

While the new instant messaging system should be instantly familiar to most users, here is a full overview of the changes:

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• Messages are now conversation-based, not topic based. This means that all messages between two people (or a group) are grouped together – like in Skype, Messenger or SMS.

• Messages are updated live, enabling users to chat in real-time without reloading the page.

• User images and emojis have been added to create a friendlier and more engaging environment.

• You can send messages and communicate with other users directly on the new profile card.

• We have moved notification-type updates to the notifications area (“the bell”).

• It’s easy to send a message to a course or project. Once you start typing the name of the recipient, itslearning will auto-suggest your courses and projects.

• A message can now only be sent to one course/project at a time.

• When teachers send a message to the course, they get the option to decide if students are allowed to reply to the message. Through this, it is possible to decide whether to let students message fellow course participants. Only staff can send messages to courses with more than 200 participants. In courses with fewer participants, the teacher can allow students to send to everyone in the course.

• The privacy settings have been streamlined and simplified based on customer feedback.

• Forwarding to email is not supported, but users can subscribe to email alerts when they receive new messages. Users who currently use email forwarding will receive hourly updates of new messages instead.

• There will be a link to a “read-only” version of the old messages so users can see and access them. We will clearly inform users where they can find their old messages.

Simplified Privacy Rules (e-safety)

Privacy is a set of rules which determines which users are allowed to see and communicate with other users within itslearning, configurable by administrators through profiles and policies. Using these rules, it is possible for administrators to limit interaction between users, such as blocking communication between students at different schools, while allowing teachers to communicate freely across a site. We are now streamlining and refreshing privacy, making it easier to understand and configure, give better support for blocking communication between students and remove some of the existing performance issues experienced by our larger customers.

The new streamlined privacy rules focus what users can do – making set-up simpler and privacy easier to understand. For example, the new rules allow you to define who users can search for and initiate communication with – where the old system asked who can search for you or who is allowed to send you messages. We're also making it optional to allow communication within common courses and projects.

The new privacy rules will have two main rules, defining who a user is allowed to search for and who they can initiate communication with:

• Search for: Defines which other users the active user is allowed to search for. Default, all users are allowed to search for all other users, across all organisations. However, you

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are allowed to remove or restrict users on role and organisation. You can also choose if the user should be allowed to search for members in their own courses or projects.

• Initiate communication to: Defines which other users the active user is allowed

to initiate communication with. Also defaults to no restrictions, but can be limited similarly to search for. You can also choose if the user should be able to initiate communication with members in their own courses or projects.

It is possible to define these rules for different roles (Staff, Students and Guests) and different organization levels, i.e. Site/district and School/organisation.

A user will always be able to respond to messages that another user has sent to them. If you have received a message, you will be able to answer it even if you are not allowed to search for, or initiate communication to, the user who sent you the message. Even if everything is

restricted, there are still some fixed rules that will allow some key communication, that cannot be overridden:

• Parents are always allowed to search for and initiate communication with their own children.

• Organisation Administrators are always allowed to manage users at their own organisation(s).

• System Administrators are always allowed to manage all users at the site.

• Mentors are always allowed to search for and initiate communication with their learners and the parents of their learners.

• Learners are always allowed to search for and initiate communication with their parents, teachers and mentors.

No other changes are introduced to the privacy system at this time.

Please note: Since we are changing the way the rules are set-up, we are also planning to migrate the existing privacy settings into the new format for customers who have set rules through profiles or policies. The migration will be done as part of rolling out the new instant messaging system. We will migrate following the rules below:

Old setting Brief explanation New settings Visible to: All

settings

Defines which other users can see users with this setting.

Not migrated

No longer supported and not possible to map to new ruleset.

Communicate to:

All settings

Defines which roles the active user can send messages to.

Migrated

Mapped directly to both the new Initiate communication to and Search for settings accordingly:

Learners = Students Staff = Staff

Guests = Guests Receive

communication from: All settings

Defines which other users are able to send

Not Migrated

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messages to the active users

No longer supported and not possible to map to new ruleset.

Changes in Related Functionality

The old messages system is deeply integrated within other areas in itslearning. Our goal has been to keep these integrations where they have value, while removing redundant functionality.

As a result, please observe the following changes: we are simplifying and cleaning house!

• The messages content block on dashboards has been removed. With the messaging system always available from the global menu, this is not needed.

• Gmail & Office 365 mail integrations: These remain, and have their own drop down menus from the Global Menu, giving quick access.

• IMAP / POP3 accounts: These will remain. These also get their own drop down menu from the Global Menu if the user has set up such integrations.

Customers Needing to Retain the Old Messages System

The instant messages system is the baseline for itslearning, and represents how we believe itslearning should be. However, due to local regulations, some specific customers will be able to retain the old messaging system for a while. We are working with these customers via the local teams. We are also improving the new messages constantly over the next 12 months to help mitigate these issues so all users can benefit from the enhanced message system.

A New Bulletin Board

The bulletin board has been transformed to a hub where teachers can post updates in seconds.

It works just like you are used to from social media - for instance instant sharing and automatically embedding web links.

We believe lowering the threshold for posting simple, informal updates will encourage more activity in the digital classroom.

The major initial changes will be see in the Course Bulletin Board. These are:

• Always enabled: To streamline communication between course teachers and students, the course bulletin boards will always be enabled and it will not be possible to disable these. We're doing this in order to guide teachers to use one common way of

announcing information to their students, across courses.

• Redesigned: We've redesigned the bulletins to facilitate more communication:

o The picture of the author is shown to make it appear as a conversation.

o The two latest comments are always visible and can be commented on directly.

• Faster and easier: Creating bulletins has never been easier:

o Create bulletins directly from the course page with inline text editor. The rich text editor is gone, and teachers can focus directly on the text. While this takes away

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some options like plug-ins, formula editor and the audio recorder, it focuses on the message. Just like many other notification systems you are used to.

o Embedding! Pasted links are embedded automatically such as audio and videos, so they are playable directly on the page (e.g. YouTube, Vimeo, Prezi).

• Mobile Friendly: The inline editor works well in any browser across all devices.

• Choose if comments are allowed: Course-wide setting to set if comments can be made to bulletins or not. (Allowing comments can also be set on a bulletin per bulletin basis).

• Performance boost: Improved performance by reducing the number of updates when creating a course from template or applying a course template.

• Old Bulletins: In existing courses, bulletins from the old bulletin board will continue to show at the bottom of the new bulletin board, until they are removed. However, they will be grouped at the bottom of the content block, and only current and future bulletins will be available. When the teacher posts new bulletins, these will always be shown above the old.

Image 7: Screenshot of the new bulletins, showing an embedded YouTube video and a comment.

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Introducing the “Stream”

The stream is a new and improved version of the “Recent Changes” content block, and it will be placed on the user’s start page (“Home”). The stream is an aggregate of the updates and resources posted in a user's courses and groups.

The main changes from Back to School 2016 are:

• A New Design: The "Recent changes" is now replaced with "Recent updates", which now has a more news feed like appearance.

• Bulletins with content and comments: Course bulletins in the stream will now also show the content directly in the stream, together with the comments. This gives users a fast way to keep up to date on the latest news, and follow and participate in the dialogue in the comments section.

• More Personalised: The items in the list will be personalized by showing the image of the user who posted the update.

• Continuous Scroll: You can now easily scroll your stream to see the history of updates, without leaving the page.

Image 8 The stream showing a notification and a course bulletin with an embedded YouTube video.

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Your Students

One of our key goals is to give our users quick and efficient access to key information they need every day. With the new Your Students option in the global menu, we're giving teachers an even better overview than they have today. It empowers the teacher to have a full overview of his or her students. They appear in a list which the teacher can filter on courses. More information about each student is just a click away.

The all courses view gives the teacher information about the student’s last visit, while the course view gives information about the student’s last visit as well as an overview of assigned and completed tasks. Both views give access to the full Profile Card through a click on their name.

Image 9: "Your Students", with all courses selected.

The New Profile Card

The Profile Card is a summary of important information about another user, including their profile and various reports like assessments, attendance and behaviour. We’re now giving the profile card a major overhaul:

• A new design: The profile card is brought in line with our new visual style, and will always open in a (modal) window on top of itslearning, and not in a new window.

• An Activity feed: Teachers can get a quick overview of the latest activity of a student.

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• Instant messaging: If the message system is enabled, each of the tabs have direct access to sending the student messages. Thus the teacher can send messages to a student while viewing the student’s details without leaving the profile card.

• Aggregated reports: The old aggregated reports are still here. These will be updated to the new design in a future release.

Image 10: The new Person Profile modal window, showing the user's profile. Please note that the Activity stream is missing from this image.

The New Library Experience

We’ve done an extensive redesign of the Library, where we’ve focused on:

• Encouraging more users to publish their own work to the Library, building content commonly available.

• Improving the search experience to make the Library the preferred starting point for finding content.

• Replacing the current search solution with a new “state-of-the-art” search engine.

We’ve been piloting the new Library for some time, and are now ready to present this to all our users.

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Image 11: Searching in the new Library.

The Library enables you to search for learning objects published by other teachers or by content providers. Third party content availability is dependent on your school or school district’s

agreements. When you create learning objects, the Library offers you the possibility of

collaborating with fellow teacher and publishing the completed result as learning objects to the Library. Thus, you can help others in their daily work and you will also benefit by using others’

published content in your work.

The itslearning App

Reaching out to our users where they are, no matter their location and their device, is a key part of our New itslearning experience. We’ve put a lot effort in making the web version of itslearning look and work great on all devices. But we also exploit the possibilities native apps give us, by letting them notify our users as things happen.

We are continuing our support for our native app, and will be releasing an updated version to reflect the changes that are being made in itslearning:

• Rewritten and Redesigned: We're updating the native apps to fully align with the itslearning user experience and pave the way for meeting our user's expectations of native apps. This includes both a technical update as well as a full visual redesign aligned to itslearning's new visual style. The iOS and Android apps will not look like they currently do, but will fit the design guidelines on the respective platforms.

• Better Features: The revamped apps will still have the same features as before, but with some improvements including full support for the Stream and better support for instant messaging. This includes some improvements to the user experience.

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• Stream: The new Stream from your landing page will be available in the native app.

The Early Learners Interface is Discontinued

This summer the early learner course interface is being retired from itslearning. This means that:

• It will no longer be possible to create new early learner courses.

• Any existing early learner courses will be converted to ordinary courses.

Our design team is looking into how we optimise the new itslearning for our youngest users/users with special needs, and we will communicate these updates at a later date.

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3. Introducing the New itslearning Experience

When we set our main goals for the product and our user experience, it became clear from the feedback we gathered and the users we interviewed, that we needed to take some major steps to modernise itslearning in order to make it the platform our users expect and deserve.

Summer 2016 sees enhancements to the itslearning user experience for all customers. This is the first stage of an exciting and fundamental improvement to the way users work with

information across itslearning. We call the final destination the New itslearning.

We knew that this would require a lot of work and effort, and that it would take time to get to the place we wanted to be. We are now ready to take the first, full step on our journey towards the future, and we are fully releasing the New itslearning experience to new customers for Back to School 2016.

Based on the feedback we have received so far; we see that the New itslearning experience is a definite change for the better. It is easier to use on mobile devices where the old fashioned dashboard concept does not work well, and we see that it represents a fresh, modern platform built around the most important tasks and questions for our users:

“What do I need to do, how can I share important content with others, how do I get a quick and easy overview of all my student’s progress, how do I communicate quickly and effortlessly with my peers and my students – on any device?”

We identified 5 core areas as key for our initial offering of the New itslearning experience. These areas represent major evolutions of itslearning – representing a positive shift in how our users structure itslearning and the processes itslearning supports – and that are unique to the New itslearning experience. These areas are:

• Visual Design and Language: We take the full leap forward with our new design philosophy.

• New Navigation: The menu structure is simplified to support easier navigation and quicker and easier access to core tasks and core content.

• New home page: We’re giving all users one new start page, which will give an instant, aggregated overview of their status, tasks and actions to take.

• Courses are refreshed: We’re starting our overhaul of the most important areas of itslearning: Courses!

• Welcome to groups: Under the new “Groups” tab you will find hierarchy dashboards and projects (communities).

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New itslearning – the Visual Design

The New itslearning experience represents a quantum leap in user experience.

Image 12: The new home page with all key information in one place.

A New Navigation

A key goal for us has also been to simplify the navigation, and build it around the most important tasks and processes the user does every day. We’ve built a new navigation structure which now gives our users quick access to their most important tasks, and key information about their student’s progress, which will empower our users and let them focus on their core tasks.

When defining the new navigation structure, we decided on a set of guiding principles:

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• Streamline the interface, removing interface elements which took focus away from the user’s main task.

• Maximise the space used for the actual content and remove out-of-date interaction patterns and navigation structures.

• Give the user access to key navigation structures and features on a global level, independent of where they are in itslearning.

• Provide a navigation structure that is mobile friendly and designed for mobile first. This means that we ensure that all interfaces and tools work well on a mobile phone, before extending them with support for larger screens.

Based on results from usability tests, we believe that the new navigation structure will be seen as more intuitive by new users of itslearning, while still feeling familiar to existing users who are starting to use this modern design. The main changes are:

• Simplified Global Menu Navigation.

• The Left Menu is removed.

• We introduce a new Personal Menu.

• “Your Students” is now always available from the global menu.

The Global Menu is still the main navigation element providing the user access to the main areas of itslearning, but we’ve streamlined it by taking out old-fashioned interaction elements that took up space, but did not offer good value. The main changes are:

• Breadcrumbs have been removed altogether.

• The Shortcut menu has been removed and replaced with a new course/groups menu giving easy access to relevant courses, projects and dashboards.

• We have completely taken away the big header.

Image 13: The full view of the new Global Menu.

Image 14: The Global Menu on mobile devices. Collapsed (left) and extended (right).

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The Left Menu, e.g. the list of dashboards and the tree menu in a course has been moved to more logical places giving the user equal – or better – access to the content, including the new

“Groups” menu and the “Resources” page in courses and projects.

Image 15: The Left Menu has been moved from courses, freeing up more space for the content.

While we know that many of our users have found the Left Menu useful, they also tell us that it takes up valuable screen space. Furthermore, some of the content in the tree menu has been difficult to access on mobile devices.

We are introducing a new Personal Menu that gives the user direct access to their personal content no matter where they are in itslearning. This includes information about their

assessments, their files, their learning objectives and almost everything a user would refer to as

“my stuff”. The user can “fold out” the menu by clicking on his or her name in the Global Menu.

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Image 16: The Personal Menu, giving instant access to the user’s content.

A New Home Page

One of the most important goals for a learning platform is to give the users a good overview of

“What’s new?” and “What’s coming up?”.

When talking to our users and students, one of the clearest messages we received was that a majority find it hard to get a good overview of these tasks. While many districts and schools have made a great effort to make their dashboards a welcoming place for their users, this is unfortunately not the case for the majority of our users, and is a barrier towards realising the full potential of itslearning as a true digital classroom.

To help our customers, teachers and learners have a great starting page; we are now

introducing a new, common home page for all our users. This page will give the user the best possible overview of their tasks, the recent updates and all upcoming events:

• The Stream shows Recent Updates and gives the user an overview of the latest changes and bulletins from their courses.

• The task list presents students with an overview of their upcoming prioritised tasks, and access to tasks that have been completed, while teachers get an overview of all their follow-up tasks.

• Events shows all the relevant calendar events.

Combined, these three information streams make it a lot easier for our users to get an

immediate overview of what’s happening and what is expected of them: a single start page for

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all users. At a glance this page will answer the two questions users have when logging in:

“What’s new?” and “What’s coming up?”.

We’re Refreshing Courses

Another message we received from our students is that many of them have struggled to get a clear and consistent overview of what’s going on in their individual courses. The goal for the new Course Overview page is to give the students a good overview.

Image 17: The new Course Overview page

The Course Overview page acts as the starting page for our courses, providing course

participants an at-a-glance overview of the key information streams in the course: The planner, course tasks, bulletins, the recent changes stream, and a view of the course calendar events.

Our user research has shown us that this represents an information flow which is much more accessible and easily understood than what we have today. Teachers can post information bulletins using the new Bulletin Board. Students can easily comment on the bulletins, and thereby add their input and increase student engagement.

If the teacher wants to give a message to one or a number of students in a class, or the whole class, he can easily reach them through the new Messaging system. The messaging system also allows students to reach out to teachers. Students can also communicate here when helping each other do homework. Messages is more chat-like than before, to lower the threshold for communication.

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Finally, by streamlining the Course Overview page, it is no longer possible to add additional content blocks to the Course Overview page. We know that some teachers have used the old course dashboard to provide high quality content and information to their students through good use of bulletins, contextual information, images and text. Unfortunately, this has not been the case for most, and students are often met with course dashboards without content or with outdated content. We strongly believe that the new Course Overview page will give our students a common, easily understandable entry point into their courses.

In addition to the new Course Overview page, we’re introducing more improvements to the courses in line with our new design philosophy. For example, a new course sub menu, which gives access to the different sections in the course previously found in the left menu:

Image 18: The new course sub menu.

We’re also introducing a new resources page for courses, which contains the folder structure for the course content.

Teachers can add resources and activities to a course using the plus-button in the upper right- hand corner. These elements are stored in folders in the Course Resources page, where they can be moved and handled in other ways, but they will call for the users’ attention through the Task list and the Latest changes module in the Course Overview page.

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Image 19: The course resource page.

Consolidation of Hierarchies and Projects

Following our goal of making key information available for the user across itslearning, and facilitating a good information flow from schools and other organisations, we are introducing the first version of the groups concept. For now, this is only a re-organisation of existing

functionality under a new menu item.

The New itslearning experience combines the old hierarchy dashboards and the projects

(communities) into a single element in the Global Menu: Groups. When clicking on the "Groups"

item in the global menu, you will get a drop down list of your hierarchy dashboards and your projects. The drop down list contains a shortlist of most recently updated dashboards (2) and projects (3).

Image 20: The groups drop down, with dashboards and projects.

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Clicking on the “See All” link takes you to a new overview page listing all your dashboards and all your projects. This page also allows the user to create and manage their projects.

Image 21: The full overview of all dashboards, and the project management page.

New Hierarchy Dashboards

Through our user testing, we discovered that users were confused about the use of the different hierarchy dashboards and their content. The use of aggregated information on these boards was particularly problematic; where information about courses, attendance, behaviour and assessments were repeated across multiple dashboards, taking focus from information from district, school or special interest group dashboards. The user had to face many, almost identical dashboards with confusing layouts.

To mitigate this, we have made some changes to the hierarchy dashboards:

• Aggregated content blocks (e.g. Courses, notifications or events) cannot be added to these dashboards. This information is now always available through other options, e.g.

the course dropdown and the personal menu.

• Layout is fixed to wide left. To avoid confusing the user with many different layouts across the different dashboards, the wide left layout is always used and cannot be changed.

• The news content block is now always present and cannot be removed.

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There are currently no other changes for existing dashboards or content blocks. It is still possible for administrators to create content blocks such as rich content and images, and plugins can still be added to a dashboard.

Image 22: The streamlined hierarchy dashboard.

Projects (Communities)

Projects (Communities) are combined into the new Groups menu section. While there are no functional changes to projects, we’re introducing the new navigation structure here as well: The left menu is gone, we are introducing a new projects sub menu and a resources page, and it is possible to add new content directly from the project dashboard by pressing the “+” button, top right.

Image 23: The new project landing page, where the new sub menu replaces the left menu.

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A New Assignment Tool

The Assignment Tool is the most used activity in itslearning. On average around two million answers are submitted each month. Wouldn’t it be great if teachers could share their assignments in the Library?

We’re introducing a brand new Assignment Tool for new customers for Back to School 2016.

Existing customers will still use the old assignment tool and will make the switch later this school year.

The Assignment Tool supports many practices. For example, individual or group assignments, the use of the plagiarism control, anonymous submission, etc.

In addition to making the assignment shareable, we’ve simplified the user interface. Actions that aren’t that common will by default not be shown in the interface.

Image 24. Adding a new assignment

The new Assignment Tool is the first tool that will use a new framework for adding and

assigning content in a course. This framework offers generic actions in a consistent way for all tools. These actions include making content visible for students (“activating”), connecting learning objectives and assigning content to students.

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Image 25: An assignment ready to be published.

We will provide separate release notes and additional documentation describing the new assignment tool before Back to School 2016.

Existing Customers: Migrating to the new itslearning experience

From Back to School 2016, the New itslearning experience will be available for all new

customers. However, we know that some of our existing customers are eager to take the leap with us right from the start, to start getting the full benefit of the New itslearning experience. This is of course possible, and something we encourage. Some existing customers are already getting the New itslearning experience enabled from early June.

However, there are a few things existing customers need to be aware of and take into

consideration before moving to the New itslearning experience. The following sections highlight the main areas existing customers need to be aware of.

The Hierarchy Dashboards are no longer available from the landing page. These are now available under the Groups section, and aggregated content blocks will no longer be available.

The Course Dashboards are replaced by the course overview page. This page does not support content blocks, which means this will happen to existing course dashboards:

• All content blocks of the type “Create” (Files images, poll, rich content, rises) will be removed from the interface.

• All aggregated content blocks + plugins will be removed from the interface.

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• Old bulletins will be available in the new course overview page.

• Task list and calendar block are not affected.

• itslearning elements in folders, such as Pages, Tests, Assignments etc. will not be affected.

How much these changes will affect existing customers, depends on to what extent courses are reused. For those who want to keep old dashboard content, we suggest that you make a page and copy and paste content from the course to this page before the switch. For now, this must be done manually. We are discussing making this automatic, but we don’t know the size of the need yet. Sometimes cleaning out your closet is a refreshing thing to do!

The View as option in courses is no longer available. While some of our teachers appreciated this feature, it did not really provide a full picture of how other users see the dashboards, and it ignored the permission system. In addition, the new course overview page is now almost identical for the different user groups, so viewing as other users would be more or less redundant.

For parents, the child dashboards are no longer visible on the start page. This is now more prominently placed in the global menu.

When using the New itslearning experience, the new landing page will be the default landing page for all users. However, it will still be possible for administrators to select a different landing page through the use of profiles or policies.

When existing customers want to start using the New itslearning experience, we suggest the following: Make sure to fully understand what will happen when a site is moved to the New itslearning experience. Your key account manager in itslearning can help you by presenting both the benefits of moving and the major points of attention like the dashboard, left menu and course overview page.

Our local teams will work with customers to decide when it is best for them to move to the new itslearning. We are starting new customers, who have no legacy content, with the new itslearning now. For our existing customers we will offer migration paths to the new itslearning starting later this year.

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4. Custom Skins & Intermediate Skins

Today, itslearning has the option to make some minor adjustments to the look and feel through the use of skins, including customer skins, intermediate skins, custom logos and a few other design options.

For existing customers, that is customers who are not migrating to the New itslearning experience, we will continue to support all existing skins.

Custom skins (Custom Themes): Existing custom skins will continue to behave as they have done for customers who have bought these, with a couple of exceptions:

- Content blocks no longer have a separate colour for headers

- We are removing the big header with the exception of those who have a custom logo.

This gives back valuable screen space for user’s content.

For the best user experience, we recommend customers with the big header and a customized logo to switch to the small header.

Intermediate skins: The intermediate skins (animal misfits, space theme and intermediate) will continue to work as before, including the icon version.

• Summer Sky: This skin will also be supported after the design refresh.

• Full header: Customers who have the large header will still be able to keep this.

• Custom logo: Customers who use our standard skin and have uploaded their own logo will still see this.

Please note that customers who use any of these skins will not get the full benefit of the design changes, as some of our design choices for the global menu are overridden by their custom skins. We strongly encourage those of our customers who use the Summer Sky skin, and customers who are still using the large header to consider switching to the default skin and the small header to get the full benefit of the new design.

Custom Skins and Branding for the New itslearning

Moving forward, we will be using design language, visual cues and colours much more actively.

This means that we will need to have a different approach to how our customers and users will be able to brand and customise the New itslearning experience.

However, we do understand and appreciate how important branding is for some of our customers, and that the option to brand and personalise the learning platform is a key requirement in some of the segments we are working in. We are now initiating a research project to determine the best way forward to combine the need for branding, personalising and customisation of itslearning with our new user experience. We expect to see the results of this work in Q3-Q4 2016, and will return with more information then.

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This means that until we know more, we are not going to offer any options for customisation of skins for customers who are using the New itslearning experience. The existing skin process will not be valid and no custom skins can be used for the New itslearning experience. The New itslearning experience will only support the visual design presented in this document.

"Back to School 2016"