The New Instructure Roadmap

[shaun_moon]

I. LOVE. MY. JOB.

I love it.

One of the things I love the most is talking with the people that use Intructure’s products.

I love learning about your goals.

I love learning about how you creatively solve problems.

I love (believe it or not) hearing about your frustrations.

There’s just one problem—there aren’t enough hours in the day and days in the week to talk with all of you. That’s a bummer for me, but it’s more than that when you don’t have the information that you need to effectively accomplish your goals with the tools we’re working on to support you.

So while someone else works on the “more hours in the day” problem, we’re going to work on better artifacts for communicating roadmap information for Instructure products.

Enter roadmap.canvaslms.com.

As part of the revamp of our community platform, we’ve added a page where we're showing a forecast of the next three months of work on Instructure products. The information you’ll find on the Roadmap is checked and updated at least once a month on the same cadence as information is refreshed internally. This cadence, of course, will mean that sometimes the release date for a feature will be delayed as teams can often encounter hidden complexities in the technology, or they may need to address emergent issues in other parts of the product. It can also mean that features are added and release dates can move up on the schedule.

Features on the Roadmap may often include related links to blogs and idea conversations. These supplemental links provide some background regarding the feature and provide you with more information. And once a feature in the current month has been released, we’ll include a link to the relevant release notes document.

I hope that everyone will check in on the Roadmap regularly—share it with others in your organization as a first line of inquiry for “what’s going on with Instructure’s products?”

[Maeve_McCooey]

Can I ask why only 3 months? It doesn't give customers much scope to consider how they can plan for the upcoming changes/releases. Also, it leaves us feeling a bit blind to any major updates especially if they change workflows and delivery of learning content/assessment and in turn any policies/processes.

[venitk]

I think @Maeve_McCooey makes a good point. I'm guessing the three months is because it's hard for software developers to plan out further than that, since you have to see how things are going, do some testing, work out the bugs. I totally get that.

However, on the user side, we're already copying our Spring courses and (ideally) revising/developing Summer courses, and it's October. The way time works in our industries is just way different. If I wait until three months before a major change to plan for that change, that is a rush job and will not be done well.

For example, I would ideally start planning now for any major changes being made this summer (ie, New Quizzes). It will take us months (as in, 6-12 months) to move all of our quizzes from classic to new quizzes, but we don't want to start that until New Quizzes is at parity with Classic Quizzes. If we had a firmer timeline for when that parity would happen and a firm date for when Classic will be turned off, we could put together a schedule, plan our revision and development schedule around having to migrate quizzes, train our students and instructors, etc.  In other words, start the project management process. If we only know three months out when all this will happen? Uffda. 

I don't have a suggested solution because I do understand that you need to see how a project is working before you can announce dates. I just wanted to build off of what Maeve was saying from the user perspective.  

[warren_goetzel]

Hi @shaun_moon - Will a roadmap for Catalog and/or Bridge be published as well? Thanks! 

[AlvinWilkes]

It would be beneficial to allow rubrics/standards to be added already created courses that use an external tool (such as nearpod).   The current solution is to go in to the already created assignment, change the turn in type, save, add the standard, go back and change the submission again to the tool (nearpod), save and then should work.  Just allow us to add it on the original screen rather than have to change, save, add, change, save again.