Release Notes

  • Updated

Fall 2024 Roadmap

A huge thank you to everyone who took the time to share their thoughts and ideas in our Fall roadmap survey!  We truly appreciate your input.  The clear winner across all votes was for easier creation of Harmonize discussions.

 

Harmonize discussions have a ton a great features, but right now that also means having to navigate through a lot of settings to get everything configured.  To help tackle this challenge, we are working on two big improvements:

  1. A new topic setup experience that collects just a few key inputs from the instructor or designer and builds out a complete discussion, ready to dive in and explore
  2. Making core discussion features like Milestones and Instructions editable straight from the main discussion view (no need to dig through the full list of settings).

We are in the design phase of these features right now, but are eager to share more information in the near future.  Stay tuned!

 

July 2024

 

AI Coaching for Students!

Ok, this is a big one and a fun one and an exciting one and and and. Well, a least to us.

 

Our goal with AI coaching was to provide, when the instructor permits it, a mechanism for students to receive real time feedback on their work before or after they publish it so they can have as many retry attempts as they wish to improve their work.

 

We don't want to tell the student what is wrong with the work, we want to create a stop-and-think moment for them to self assess their work using the instructor's rubric. We're accomplishing this by showing them an indicator of how their work measures up against the rubric with simple icons and trend lines.

 

Instructors have to choose to enable this, it's not on by default in a topic!

 

A video says a thousand words, so here are 2,000 words:

 

See the following guides for more information:

 

May 2024

 

Next Image! Next Image! Next Image!

Long long ago, in a version of Harmonize far away, you used to be able to open up one of your student's images and then click next and previous buttons. We accidentally removed that. Sorry. It's back though!

 

Look for these arrows in the upper right of the image box once you open one image:

Next and Previous arrows for images

 

Respond by Drawing, Respond within Video

Hat tip to Cyntha Sargent from Yuba College for bringing a usability issue to our attention!

 

Prior to this release, if you wanted to respond by drawing on somebody's image or leave timestamped comments on a video, you had to click "comment/annotate" below the image/video. That was causing some confusion so now the buttons explicitly say:

Respond Within Video ButtonRespond By Drawing Button

 

Milestones sync to Cavas calendar 180 days ahead

Many of you diligent folks out there copying courses for next semester were confused because we didn't copy ALL of the milestones out into the canvas calendar. Sorry for the confusion, we're now copying all milestones into the canvas calendar if they occur in the upcoming 180 days so your course copy for next term should pick them all up.

 

Accessibility Catch! Captioning for Audio files

Audio files didn't use to auto-caption, you had to upload a transcript separately. Now we auto-caption them and play them inline when the audio file is playing. Thanks for the customers that pointed this out, accessibility is a never ending task so keep the accessibility feedback coming!

 

Deleted Content in Grading View and more prominent revisions!

Students...they can get....creative. Make a post, read everyone else's post, delete their post and write a new one that sounds BRILLIANT! They're destined to run a company some day. Oh wait...never mind.

 

Now you'll be able to flip a switch to see that deleted content when you're grading as well as we've made it more prominent when a student has edited their post after the initial submission.

 

Look for this toggle in your grading view which will tell you how many deleted items they have:

Display deleted items toggle

And then look for this little pill next to the student's name when looking for multiple edits. Click on it to see the edits:

3 Revisions button

 

See the following guide for more details:

 

April 2024

 

Extended Recording Times in the Harmonize Recorder and New Harmonize Screen Recording Feature

You've been asking for longer recording times on our video recorder as well as the ability to record your screen and share it and it's now available!

 

See these help guides for more information:

 

AI Generated Rubrics for Blackboard, Brightspace, and Moodle

AI Generated Rubrics a going gangbusters for our Canvas clients (released in early January). The word has been spreading and the number of users adding rubrics to their assignments is staggering! An awesome rubric with just a couple clicks? Yes please. We've designed a rubrics feature for Blackboard, Brightspace, and Moodle as well! It is currently available via a toggle in your Harmonize Course Settings and will be enabled by default in every course beginning June 2024!

 

See this help guide for more information:

 

February 2024

 

New Harmonize Reactions

We added Great Idea, Inspiring, and Unique to the list of available Harmonize Reactions

 

Reaction menu

 

Updated Student Email Notifications

Students interacting frequently and consistently has always been the goal, but boy do they do it A LOT. To that end, we're taking the first step to control the amount of notifications they receive so they don't get overwhelmed.

 

The first simplification is, when a conversation is flying, we'll condense a series of notifications that happen within a short window to a single digest email. That way, if your classmates when nuts back and forth, but you were off grabbing a coffee, you don't come back to a flooded inbox. Instead, you come back to an email or two catching you up on all that you missed.

 

We'll be taking small steps like this in the upcoming releases to make sure notifications are as useful as they can be.

 

Extended Session Timeout

We're sticklers for protecting student data. To that end, we've always had a deep disagreement on the session timeout in most LMSes. Sometimes those span an entire day which seems.....wrong to us. A student walks away from a shared lab computer and bad things happen.

 

However, we also hate annoying users, even if it's for security reasons. So we've done two things:

  • We have increased our inactivity timeout to an hour.

  • If users have multiple tabs open, activity in ANY browser tab will keep the other tabs active too and allow independent work in those other tabs.

 

Milestone Visibility extended to "Student Preview" Mode

For instructors who really love to check on what their students are going to see as they're configuring their Topics, your LMS has this nifty feature that will show them the student view for a fake student. We haven't, until now, supported that for milestones as a fake student has no progress!

 

But yes, that's caused confusion. So now, when you launch the student preview, you will see your milestones as a student would see them.

 

January 2024

 

New Look and Feel: Purple is the new Black

Harmonize has had a color upgrade to look more modern and make it easier for instructors to edit their topic instructions. Don't worry, every button is in the exact same place, but the topic instructions now have a white background and the color scheme has been updated.

Screenshot showing new purple color scheme.

 

Success Focuses and Rubric Generation with AI

(Canvas this January. Blackboard, Brightspace and Moodle during Spring)

 

Research shows that if you center your students on what success looks like, they do better. Raising outcomes is a good thing, right? To that end, we are offering two instructor facing tools that use AI to help.

 

Success Focus Areas:

With one button click, we will generate the top 4 areas where students should focus if they want to succeed. The instructor can edit if they wish and voila, the students have a clearer roadmap to do well.

 

Rubrics:

With one additional button click, the instructor can turn those success focuses into a full grading rubric so they can click-click-click their way to quicker grading with less bias.

 

Canvas LMS Administrator TODO:

In order to use this feature, your LMS administrator must enable new Canvas API scopes to make this happen, instructions will be sent in early January. Stay tuned!

 

Watch the video to see it in action: 👇

 

Check out our guide for additional details:

 

Topic instructions auto-save: never lose work again

We've long touted our auto-save feature for posts and comments, but did you realize we weren't doing the same thing for instructors when editing their topics? Well we are now. If you start working on your topic and leave for whatever reason, we will have auto-saved your work and allow you to resume editing.

 

Never miss a Question in the Q+A Forums Again

Q+A forums are a great place for your students to get their questions answered and build community, and now we've made it easier for you to keep on top of how your students use them by notifying when a student asks a question. Configure notification settings to meet your needs following these instructions.

 

October 2023

 

Brainstorm Upgraded to ChatGPT 4

Harmonize Brainstorm, which helps instructors build engaging and pedagogically sound discussion prompts, has been upgraded to ChatGPT 4.  This upgrade should improve the overall quality of each prompt.

 

LTI Submission Review for Brightspace

Our Brightspace customers can now take advantage of a new, more intuitive grading experience with LTI Submission Review.

 

Zoom Integration Removal

We have removed our Zoom integration (HarmonizeEngage) from the Meeting option in discussions.  Any meetings already created using the Zoom integration have been automatically converted to meeting URLs.  You can continue to schedule meetings and use Zoom if you wish, just simply paste in the Zoom meeting URL in the URL field.

 

August 2023

 

Submission and Grading Enhancements

Harmonize has overhauled its assignment and grade submission behavior to do the following:

  • Students who do not participate in an assignment will not have any submission sent to the gradebook
  • Students who start participating before the assignment due date will not be marked late in SpeedGrader (Canvas only)

Additionally, we've made the following improvements based on instructor feedback:

  • In discussions using Auto-Grading, scores will be automatically recalculated and updated in the gradebook for changes to the milestones and assignment dates
  • Auto-Graded discussions have a new option to give credit for late participation
  • The Grades & Activity views have received updates to improve readability and match sorting in the LMS gradebook

 

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