We’ve been spending quality time with our favorite bot - Blended Bot. We’ve upgraded Blended Bot’s ability to identify users, and to increase specificity in responses for certain user groups. Designing a great support bot is an iterative process, and each week we add more material and direction to help guide Instructors and Students to the most useful information, fast.

If you are using the Auto Grade Syncing with Canvas, the due dates for quizzes are now being pushed through correctly into Canvas. This means students can now see the due dates that you’ve set in Blended Teaching, in Canvas. This means less emails for you :)

Ahead of the Spring semester, we’ve been working on updating the onboarding experience so that it can take as little as 10 minutes for an instructor to launch a brand new class from scratch in Canvas or Blackboard. The eventual goal is that this will become self-service in a few clicks. The updates we delivered this week take us 60% towards our goal for Onboarding Improvements.

As part of our priority of using data to enhance teaching, we’ve been adding more tags to textbooks to allow us to analyze data by Country, Subject Area, Style of Teaching (Flipped, Async, etc.) and more. As more data points are gathered, we’ll be able to use this tagging strategy to allow more effective class design.

When giving a due date extension to a student, you can now allow up to 100 days past due, rather than 30 days previously.

You can now include images in quiz answer options.

You can now include images in quiz questions.

We use over 50 Saas tools each week to build Blended Teaching. Some of which we use all the time, and others less. Some grow like weeds - why are we paying adobe so much money? This week we culled a range of Saas tools that we were no longer getting value from, reducing expenditure and building speed.

Now you can preview content that is “unpublished”. Until now, content had to published in order for instructors to preview it. Now you can preview content that is unpublished.

Instructors can now preview their quizzes, whether they are unpublished, or whether they have start dates set in the future. Until now, this was not possible.

Want to see stats around your quizzes? Pass rates, discrimination scores, distribution curves. We’ve just released Quiz Analytics, which also apply to your historic quizzes. Click here to learn more (see section 4 of this guide) →

Now Instructors and Students can see the results for each of their attempts from an assessment. This is already live, and working for both instructors and students.

When students complete an assignment, you can ask them to upload a file with their workings. The file size limit was 10MB, but we found this restrictive for a small number of users. So we increased it to accept file sizes up to 20MB.

• Preview for dynamic quiz questions fixed and working again.
• Time taken column on the Moderate page of a quiz fixed and populating with data.
• Renamed “Educators” to “Instructors” throughout to increase consistency.
• Renamed “Grades & Results” page to just “Grades”.