February 2025
Uploaded Documents Automatically Convert to PDF
When you upload a file that we CAN turn into a PDF, we now DO turn it into a PDF (caveat: if it's less than 20MB). This is so students without the software used to create the document can still view it.
Your students don't have MS Word because they're on a Mac? They can view and read the word document within Harmonize and only download it if they want.
Added bonus, you now get the 1st page of the PDF as the thumbnail for the attachment so your post and comments look prettier.
Why you ask? Well, it's good from an equity perspective to not have to own proprietary software. It's also good when you want to read something quickly without having to launch the software.
It's also setting us up for a future release with (Sneak Peak) the ability to leave line-item and annotation comments on anything that can be a PDF within the discussion. ie: Highlight that run-on sentence and tell the student it's a run-on. Drop pins on on their Powerpoint slides and tell them you used too many words, etc.
Copy a Rubric from one Harmonize topic to another
If you have a rubric that is exactly what you want, you can now copy it into other Harmonize topics. Located in the traditional edit instructions area, scroll down to where you would find the rubric and click "select existing".
Why you ask? Many schools have a standard rubric they want to use for every discussion in the course. Also (Sneak Peak) this sets us up for the upcoming Peer Critique functionality where you may want to copy the rubric used for peer critique to be a part of the final assignment.
January 2025
Small Group and Private PDF Annotations
Our PDF annotation tool now offers flexible visibility options, allowing section, group, or private settings similar to discussions. Use Blackboard and Canvas groups for student annotations, or switch to private mode for individual visibility.
Wizard creation for non-graded discussions
In early December 2024, we launched a wizard for easy creation of graded discussions, and now it's available for non-graded discussions too.
AI Coaching Upgrades
The AI Coach is now smarter, reducing "not coachable by AI" or "Human Assessment Needed" labels.
We've noticed students pause their work when the AI coach indicates no progress. To encourage continued effort, we're now highlighting even small improvements.
If you forgot to set your due date in the assignment configuration, you can now do that on the first step of the wizard.
December 2024
Harmonize Discussion Creation Wizard
Our new Harmonize discussion creation wizard is live! Watch a video of it in action and share it with your instructors!
Our top feature that customers voted on was to make creation of Harmonize topics easier. To that end, we've introduced a wizard with common defaults to walk instructors through creating their topics to make this process easier.
That means their topic creation process will change!
If you want to book a training including this change, feel free to book it now!
The wizard will take them through the following guided steps:
- Step 1: Set milestones to 1 post, 2 comments, ask about Turnitin and auto-grading preferences.
- Step 2: Write their instructions with AI assistant (or skip to manual writing)
- Step 3 (optional): Offer AI Rubric creation with the AI student coach enabled by default.
- Step 4: Publish!
This will reduce fully feature topic setup to as few as 6 clicks (and some typing and review time of content generated).
The instructor can alter ALL of these options or return to the traditional edit UI at any time. Additionally, this UI will remember their preferences so subsequent topic creation is even easier.
August 2024
Canvas Calendar Milestone sync by Admins
One flaw in our syncing of milestones into the course calendar is it has required the instructor to enter the class and click "Enable Features" before students see the milestones for their class. This results in a race between the eager beaver students and the instructor to see who gets into the class first. Since the students sometimes win, they don't all see their first milestone in the calendar.
So we've made two changes:
- If the instructor has "Enabled Features" when prompted in any other course, we can use that to sync milestones so now the instructor only has to have clicked this button once. The only time they would be prompted again is if a new Canvas API feature is enabled in the future.
- Admins can go in once to allow syncing of milestones on behalf of the instructors. This is handy when a new instructor inherits a class, then the race described above is on again. This admin sync will solve this problem forever or until that admin account is disabled. Preferably do this with more than one admin account in case your administrator wins the lottery and retires to a beach in Bali.
Interested in setting up this feature? Follow these instructions: Adding Admin Tokens to Harmonize
Harmonize Usage Dashboard
Our new Harmonize Usage dashboard is available to all LMS administrators (unless you've asked us to restrict that usage to certain individuals).
Here's a quick overview of how to access the video and the types of data it contains:
Please contact support@harmonizelearning.com if you have any specific questions.
AI Coaching Study Group
We're seeking faculty or staff to participate in an couple of information cross-sharing meetings for the AI Coach for students.
We'd like to gather a group of people together who are willing to experiment with, gather data on and discuss the results together so we can see what changes or enhancements are needed. Also, a step beyond the study group, contact me if you want to actually study this formally.
Requirements for participating:
- You have 2+ instructors who are willing to give this a try. (tentative numbers are ok during signup)
- You're willing to talk to them about their use case, the results from using it and help them gather their student's feedback (we can build the surveys as a group)
- Participate in 2 zoom sessions prepping for and discussing those results. (Dates TBD based on polling participants)
If all of that sounds intriguing and something you (or somebody at your school) can take on in your already busy lives, please consider signing up!
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:
- 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
- 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:
- For Instructors: AI Coaching
- For Students: AI Rubric Feedback
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:
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:
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:
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:
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
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.
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