Teaching & Learning
We want itslearning to be a student’s one-stop-shop for grades — allowing them to quickly check grades on the device of their choosing.
This requires teachers to put those grades in first, so our gradebook works intuitively and relevant grades are exported to the SIS.
In addition, our assessment tools invite teachers to do these activities online.
Students can take a test or submit an assignment on the device of their choosing. Assignment answers can be submitted via their cloud service, such as Google Drive or One Drive.
To streamline the assessment process, teachers can view submitted documents without the need of downloading them first and can make annotations on the fly.
To lower the threshold to start with online assessment activities, we will make it possible to share them with each other via the Library.
Last Updated: March 28, 2018
Content & Software Integrations
The itslearning library is our education focused learning object repository. Based on regional, national and international standard and tagging it creates a great space for finding, sharing and re-using content from teachers and the top educational publishers.
We want to have the best LMS ecosystem for sharing educational tools and resources – this can help share knowledge, resources and make the job of teaching easier. We want to make the itslearning library our teacher’s preferred tool for searching, creating, and sharing learning resources. Today we have some customers with over 2 million resources in their itslearning library and we are improving the search usability to make finding the right content as simple as possible.
We will include better searching across the different standard systems used by different districts to improve search results (standards cross-walking).
We want to build on the 20+ national and international publishers who have added their content to itslearning. We will extend the options for importing and managing publisher content. We will give publishers more viability of usage so they can target their content to better support key educational challenges.
Our key themes all interrelate to make the itslearning library the heart of our teaching ecosystem.
Last Updated: March 28, 2018
Product Roadmap
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Teaching & Learning Seamless Google Cloud Integration in Assignment Tool
Our current Google integration in our Assignment tool will be extended to allow teachers to not only select Google files as attachment, but also create a copy of a Google file for each student or group as basis for their submission. Students can “complete” this copy and submit their version of it.
The assessment process will also be enhanced, making it possible to assess the answer at the same time you can see the submitted file.
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Teaching & Learning Seamless Office 365 Cloud Integration in Assignment Tool
As with Google, itslearning will include Office 365 tools such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint in the assignment flow. Teachers can choose a file from their OneDrive or create a new Office file and include it in their assignment. This can either provide additional instruction, or provide each student with a copy of the file to be completed and submitted.
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Teaching & Learning Mobile App – New features & functionality
Teaching and Learning is all about engagement with teachers and students, and we’re continuing to enhance our mobile capabilities.
Crucial information at first glance: We aim to gather the really important stuff on the first page you see — find your lessons, tasks and plans in one place. The details are only a click away!
Post important bulletins on the go: We are adding more options to be interactive in the app. Adding bulletins and calendar events is coming soon.
Improved security: Forced itslearning password change and setting up pin code or touch ID to open the app are both in planning.
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Teaching & Learning Peer Assessment
itslearning will now include the ability to use peer assessment (or ‘review’) on an assignment.
To make life easy for our teachers, itslearning will automatically distribute submitted work among students. The teacher only needs to let us know how many answers each student should assess.
For each student, teachers will be able to see the peer assessments received as well as the peer assessments this student has given.
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Teaching & Learning Learning Paths
A Learning Path can be defined in a myriad of ways, but here is how we plan to include Learning Paths within itslearning:
Our Learning Paths will be a sequence of resources that a student can work through at their own pace. The path can be a linear sequence (moving on to the next resource) or a branched sequence where the next resource depends on the results of a student on a resource.
Teachers can arrange the material in steps and set the rules for alternatives, free navigation and unlocking. In essence, the teacher or curriculum manager defines the release conditions upon which new resources and activities will be presented to the user. Example of release conditions can be completion of a task or achievement of a certain score.
Learning Paths can be shared and re-used, and these shared paths can be further customised by teachers. Teachers can see where students are in the path and provide more support if required. Students can self-pace their learning path, review progress and see what they need to do to move on to the next step.
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Teaching & Learning Gradebook improvements
The Gradebook is becoming faster, smarter and more efficient for teachers using itslearning.
– Improved Gradebook performance allows for faster loading and responsiveness even for large classes
– Enhanced accessibility improves usability for all types of Gradebook users
– Modern UI updates will breathe new life into some dated-looking pages
– Enhancements to keyboard navigation allows for quicker editing and fewer clicks
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Teaching & Learning Flexible ePortfolio functionality
A personal ePortfolio of student work and experiences is an important part of the lifelong learning process. Our revised portfolio will:– Allow all work to be recorded in a student’s own personal portfolio– Store outcomes from all our core tools– Provide secure external access under school/organisation control– Provide export capabilities for students to keep their portfolio into the future -
Teaching & Learning Improved Creating/Editing/Submitting course content
We´re making it much easier for teachers to create and add content, and have this content presented to their students where they want to see it. This includes showing resources in events, creating resources directly in the calendar, and making closer connections between the course page and the calendar: what the teacher add in the calendar should become plans in the planner behind the scenes and vice versa.
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Teaching & Learning All-in-One Grading Tool
It will now be possible to assess a submitted assignment or answer while viewing the submitted file.
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Teaching & Learning Standards-based Gradebook
The standards-based gradebook gives a wealth of information to help teachers assess students’ mastery of learning objectives and adjust instruction nimbly.
– Configurable standards-based scales allow for flexibility for your organisation to determine mastery
– Teachers can record standards-based scores for learning objectives used in gradebook items
– Combine individual learning objective scores into overall mastery
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Teaching & Learning New Student Homepage, "This Week"
To give students better control of their learning, a new module called “This Week” will be introduced on their homepage. The module will be closely connected to the calendar and the course pages to display tasks, homework and plans from all courses.
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Teaching & Learning Editable Planner
Increased use of the planner will ensure that learning goals, activities and resources will reach the students in an efficient way through the student’s plan view. With the new editable planner, we want to lower the threshold of making plans in a course. The next step will be to connect events and plans.
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Teaching & Learning Shareable Test Tool
Our popular test tool was due for a facelift, so we are making it both shareable and mobile friendly. It is already available for new customers, and will be default for new customers as soon as we have important features like QTI import and TMB capabilities in place.
The next goal is to replace the current tool for all our users with a full feature set and a few extras that we have added based on user input. We’ll keep your old tests functional, with an option to migrate them to the new tool.
In 2018, you will also see item banks in itslearning for the first time, and we are excited to give this valuable addition to an already popular tool.
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Teaching & Learning Item Banks for Assessments and Tests
In 2018 you will also see item banks in itslearning for the first time, and we are excited to give this valuable addition to an already popular tool.
Question banks will be for teachers to share questions with their peers, and to find questions from 3rd party vendors. We aim to achieve QTI certification for question banks, and QTI V2.1 format will be required for import from external tools.
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Teaching & Learning Unify files
Teachers will be provided a completely consistent file experience across itslearning. In “Your Files”, all of a user’s files in itslearning will be accessible in one single place.
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Teaching & Learning Quick-Create Workflows
We´re making it much easier for teachers to create and add content, and have this content presented to their students where they want to see it. This includes showing resources in events, creating resources directly in the calendar, and making closer connections between the course page and the calendar: what the teacher add in the calendar should become plans in the planner behind the scenes and vice versa
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Teaching & Learning Easier to use the Survey and Discussion tool on mobile devices
The experience of answering a survey and participating in a discussion will now be greatly improved when on a mobile device.
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Teaching & Learning New Media Recorder
We are introducing a new sound/video recorder based on WebRTC (Web Real-Time Communication) which does not need Flash installed. We are also updating our existing online “Flash-based” media recorder to work better with devices that support Flash. For our end users this means more support on more devices for recording sound and video.
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Communication & Collaboration Parent App
Mobile Engagement with Parents & Students.
All children – one app: Parents have used the itslearning app either logged in as themselves with very limited functionality, or logged on as their child, and thus only being able to see one at a time. In the parent app, they can get all their children in one place, also across sites.
Overview of tasks: You’ll find your child’s tasks sorted by due date, with homework and completed work clearly tagged.
Plans and events at a glance: We’ll start off with plans, but move on to combine information in one place to make it very easily accessible and also consistent with planned development in web and the itslearning app.
Status and progress: How is my child doing? What were the latest results? We’re adding access to the assessment record with a quick glance at the latest assessments and an option to deep-dive into all the assessments in each course.
Messages: The messaging system used in the web platform will also be available in the app to make it easy to stay in touch with the school.
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Communication & Collaboration School Branding
Branding is very important for many of our customers — a company’s brand is their business identity and is one of a company’s most valuable assets. Customers using the new, Modern itslearning will be able to personalise their itslearning platform by adding a banner image, a logo and a title on the top of the home page (MyPage) and at the organisation level (hierarchy dashboard).
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Communication & Collaboration Course banner
Teachers can make their students feel welcome by personalising their course page with a top banner. The banner consists of an image, the profile pictures of the course teachers and a text. It will appear between the top menu and the content on the course overview page.
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Communication & Collaboration Enhanced large course & group management
We now offer better support for larger courses. Customers with many participants can choose to automatically create course groups. The teacher can choose the number of groups he or she wants to auto-create or the number of students in each group.
Participants and groups will be combined into one view.
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Communication & Collaboration New participant page
Adding participants and setting up hierarchy synchronisation will now be easier. Group management will also be a part of the new participant page.
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Communication & Collaboration Expanded Messaging Capabilities
The messaging system will be expanded with broadcast options, such as sending announcements to many users.
In addition, support will be added for better auditing of messages and more options for notifications on desktop and mobile devices.
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Reporting & Analytics Student 360° Reports
These 360 degree reports will give teachers up-to-date information across three key areas: student progress, student activity and student attainment. Teachers can quickly compare all students in a course and deep-dive into each students’ key data — displayed in straightforward infographics. These reports will help teachers understand how each student is engaging and progressing with the course content and whether they need to create other activities for students who may have spent little or no time in course or on task.
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Reporting & Analytics Student 360° Reports - for mentors and school leaders
The Student 360 Degree Reports will be accessible to mentors and school leaders, allowing them to see aggregated reports for students across courses.
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Reporting & Analytics Student 360° Reports - extended with the new standards grade book
A summary of the new standards gradebook will be added in to the Student 360 Degree Reports.
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Content & Software Integrations Library Recommendations & Personalizations
It will be even easier to use the Library with our Recommendation Engine, which suggests content that may be of interest to the user based on past searches.
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Content & Software Integrations Library: even better visibility & usability
We’ll continue tweaking our Library to ensure the best results are quickly available to users.
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Content & Software Integrations 3rd Party Content Support/Interoperability
We´re extending our capabilities to import and manage content into our library. We´re making it easier for schools to import their own content, and for content providers to offer their content directly in our library through open standards such as LTI.
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Content & Software Integrations 3rd Party Tool Integrations
We are extending our developer program to make it much easier to make third party tools available for end users. This includes introducing SSO using LTI for Modules and Plugins,and extending our Rich Text Editor with the LTI Deep Linking protocol. This will give extend options for 3rd parties to securely embed content in itslearning using LTI SSO.
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Content & Software Integrations Global Search
The itslearning search is being improved by making it easier for you to quickly find and navigate to any content, course, user or information across itslearning.