We spent a large amount of time over the past school-year analyzing how our users made use of Schoology. Our goal has always been to create a great user experience for students, teachers, parents, and faculty. We have added a great deal of new features, many of which were based on suggestions by our users. As these items were added, certain elements inherently became more complex, particularly the site navigation. As part of a major effort to keep the interface simple for individual teachers and still provide the most utility for schools and advanced users, we listened to many of your concerns and have addressed them.

The following are some of the biggest concerns by our users:

• Practicality and understanding of the feeds & blogs
• Ease of adding students into courses
• Using and understanding privacy controls
• Creating structured content
• General navigational difficulty

Practicality and Understanding of the Feeds & Blogs
Background: We added the feed to provide an aggregated list of relevant information to each user.
Problem: We found that users were confused by the look and layout of the feed. People attempted to rely on the feed as a primary source for their courses and often did not find the information they were looking for. Users who wrote blogs noticed that if a user subscribed to their blog, then posts were added to a subscribers feed. This was an interesting concept, but unfortunately caused confusion.
Solution: The feed has been more appropriately renamed to “Recent Activity” which really describes what the area provides. Essentially, the Recent Activity area keeps users up-to-date with any recent activity that involves them. We have redesigned this area to provide more relevant information for users. For instance, items are now intelligently grouped providing greater readability and effectiveness.

User blogs have been separated out of the Recent Activity: We found that by allowing users to post update notices (or announcements) to their Recent Activity made more sense than allowing users to blog within this area. Users can now choose to start their own blog from a separate area within their profile. If a user is interested in the content posted, they can “Subscribe to the blog” as they would an RSS feed to keep up to date with new posts.

Ease of Adding Students Into Courses
Background: In the past, teachers and administrators had to add users into the Schoology system and then enroll them into courses. We allowed uploading of user import files.
Problem: A majority of our users did not want to worry about enrolling students into their classes. Many asked if there was a way students could register for their classes on their own. For the technology-savvy people, user import files were great, but for most they were difficulty to use and understand.
Solution: Individual teachers no longer have the ability to create users. School administrators can still create users, but for individual accounts we determined that it was easier to provide teachers an “Invite Code” that students could use to register for their class. For students that exist within the school, they can be invited to join a class. We now make use of an approval process so that when a student uses the “Invite Code” they are in a pending status until the teacher approves. This prevents students from creating fictitious information and having it appear in the class.

We realize that many of you enjoyed the ability to create users. Unfortunately, giving control over another user added too many problems, confusion, and complexity when dealing with individual teachers in the same school. Everything is much more streamlined now, and should help make the process easier for everyone involved.

Using and understanding privacy controls
Background: We provide a rich set of privacy settings to allow granular controls for users, courses, and groups.
Problem: The layout of privacy forms made it difficult to understand purpose and use.
Solution: We have greatly simplified the user experience for privacy and other configuration settings. Users will now have a much better understanding of the effects of the various privacy settings.

Creating structured content
Background: When we started Schoology, users could only add simple content types. As we expanded, we developed an ability for structured content through topics. Eventually this led to changes in course formatting, and an eventual merging of “Basic” and “Topic” format courses.
Problem: Users did not want to choose a course format. Some would create their content first and decide later that they wanted to make use of some elements for more structured topics.
Solution: We created an ability for users to create any sort of content, at any time, and organize it later. We then built an adaptive navigational menu that only shows the items that are present. This way, a student does not click into “Assignments” to find out that there is nothing there. The end result is much greater flexibility in course content creation.

The Network Versus Your School
Background: When we first began Schoology, we felt that it made sense to create a default network, containing the people in your school plus anyone that you eventually connected with outside of your school.
Problem: Users did not understand why there was a network that already contained everyone within their school.
Solution: We have separated your network from your school directory. This allows greater control over contacts, and encourages potential collaboration and networking.

General Navigational Difficulty
Background: As we went through our iterative processes many elements and new features were added to Schoology.
Problem: Adding new features was great, and people loved the work we were doing; however, adding features added complexity and confusion in some areas — specifically around site navigation.
Solution: We have completely redesigned our site navigation. Now, all menu items are on the left navigation menu, meaning that there is no more guesswork. As you browse throughout the site, the left navigation dynamically updates to be relevant to your current page. This way, courses, profiles, groups, and schools have more screen real-estate to work with, and more control over content.

We apologize that this has come in such a big spurt, but we want everyone to go into the new school year filled with excitement and enthusiasm. The changes we have made were not easy, and took an entire summer to get right, but we love our users and are willing to do whatever it takes to make them happy! We hope that you enjoy upcoming changes, as there will be plenty more improvements over the next couple of months. Please feel free to share your thoughts by commenting on this blog post, or by posting to our community support area.