2021 Community Work!

[Renee_Carney]

This content is over 24-months old. While the resource is still valuable to the Community, it is important to evaluate the content to ensure that it is still relevant and reliable.

Tl;dr - Community content was migrated last summer, we had a record-breaking fall, we’ve added some new products, and now it’s time to take what we’ve learned [thus far] and reorganize.

2020 is Behind Us!

Our Community blossomed and thrived on the Jive community platform from April 2015 through August 2020, but as we’ve shared before, Jive the company was acquired and eventually phased out. Knowing this was the plan, we started mapping community content to the new software (Khoros) last spring, built the new structure over the summer, and completed the migration in August—just in time for a record breaking 20 million page views that month—1.6 million page views in one day (that’s a lot of Pandas who were helped).

*Fun fact: If the Community had still been on Jive in August 2020, we would have
crashed the system. The old platform never could have handled that amount of traffic.

 

Planning for the Future.

Since our migration, we’ve learned a lot about the capabilities and limitations of the new software.  We’ve experienced our own frustrations and challenges in finding things, surfacing content and amazing people, heard many of your suggestions to improve the experience, and welcomed a few more products to the Instructure family. If you’ve been with us a while you’ve surely noticed small changes we’ve been making to improve the experience, but now it’s time to rattle the [panda] cart!

Here’s what we have in the works:

• New Top Navigation - The top level navigation will be more product-focused, helping you dive into the product you are using and find the related resources more quickly.
• Q&A by Product - Each product will now have its own question and answer forum. For example, if you have a question about Portfolium that you want to know if it has already been asked, you will only be wading through other Portfolium questions.
• Role Focus - Once you have focused on the product you’re using, you’ll find everything you need for your role (e.g. admin, instructor, student, observer) in one space:  guides, discussions, blogs, and other content will reside together. (*If the product has roles; not all do.)
• Friend Feeds - When you add someone to your friend list, their content will populate a custom feed for you, helping you connect with and keep tabs on the people you want to follow.
• More Content Feeds - We’re not 100% on what these will look like, but our goal is to better surface the pulse of the community. 

• *Groups - We have some work outlined to improve the interest group experience as well, but that will happen after these bigger changes.

 

When will things change?

Summer 2021! Ok, we know that’s vague, and that’s kinda intentional. We want to make sure there’s time to refine designs, run them by community users, and implement well.  June is our plan, but we’ll keep you posted. 

Subscribe to the Community Users Group to get those updates.