If we were to offer a theme for this month, it would be spotlight on success. We are continuously amazed and inspired by the many success stories that you are willing to share with us, and we are so happy to share them with the community. This month’s Newsletter contains many opportunities to hear from your peers how they are making an impact on accessibility, course quality, and more!
Design Matters Live: Interactive Course Design Made Simple!
Tomorrow, April 30th at 11am MT
Join us for an interaction-packed showcase of DesignPLUS to learn how you can easily add interactivity to your Canvas content without needing to know how to code. Throughout the webinar, we’ll connect research-backed tips with practical design ideas, giving you the power to promote active learning and boost student engagement with interactive design elements. REGISTER HERE
Designing for Growth: A Continuous Improvement Journey with DesignPLUS
Tuesday, May 6th at 11MT
In this Quality Matters co-hosted webinar, we’ll explore how Florida SouthWestern State College is transforming online course design through a culture of continuous improvement and strategic integration of Quality Matters standards. Discover how design competitions, student feedback loops, and collaborative webinar watch parties are shaping a dynamic learning environment–where courses are easier to build, harder to break, and intentionally designed for success. REGISTER HERE
Many Hands, Lighter Work: Scaling Accessibility Efforts in Canvas
Thursday, May 15th – Global Accessibility Awareness Day – at noon MT
In a recent blog post we wrote for Instructure’s Study Hall, we highlighted that creating a sustainable, scaled approach for accessibility in Canvas takes a village! Join us as we co-host a companion webinar with Instructure to highlight practical strategies and real-world insights from Northeastern University, Orange Coast College, and The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania to help you more easily scale your accessibility efforts. REGISTER HERE
We’re pleased to share the recordings from each of the 3 sessions that were part of our recent virtual Customer Gathering. We hope these sessions provide the information and inspiration you need to ensure April showers bring new superpowers!
Big News: We’re branching the Design Matters Digest into a focused series: Accessibility Matters! We hope shifting to Accessibility Matters will support the important work you’re doing to improve course accessibility at your institution and highlight how Cidi Labs tools help make that work more achievable. We’ve heard loud and clear that you love the Design Matters Digest, so don’t worry–we’ll keep our focus on practical strategies for designing and delivering quality, accessible courses in Canvas.
Have the Design Matters Digests and webinars impacted your course design or your institution’s practices? Want to share your love for anything you’ve learned through this series? Tell us your Design Matters story–we can’t wait to hear it!
Did you know the entire Design Matters Live webinar series can be viewed here? Check out past episodes you may have missed!
ReadyGO is a course lifecycle management system that helps scale best practices and streamline the work required to effectively develop, deliver, and continuously improve Canvas courses. Whether it’s building new courses, getting courses ready for an upcoming term, or assessing the quality of courses, ReadyGO provides the data and tools you need – all within Canvas.
At our Customer Gathering earlier this month, we announced a Design Challenge, the winners of which will earn some shiny new Cidi Labs swag AND the gratification of seeing your design featured in our Library! Simply create an instructional page in Canvas using DesignPLUS and email the page’s HTML to support@cidilabs.com with the subject line “Spring 2025 Design Challenge” by April 30th!
April was a busy month for product updates. To learn more about what was released this month in each product, please refer to the respective Release Notes:
Also, joining our Customer Community on Slack is a great way to get notified as soon as product updates are released!
During our recent Customer Gathering, several amazing customers shared how they’re prioritizing and supporting accessibility efforts. In the chat, a few of you asked for an Accessibility Workflow guide. Well, ask and you shall receive! These guides are designed to help both admins and educators easily remediate issues and design accessible course content. You can duplicate and customize them as needed!
Want to know more about the new data and reports available in UDOIT Admin? This video tutorial will walk you through all the details and also highlight the ways that you can customize the new accessibility Scorecard.
Here’s to authoring many more success stories together,
The Cidi Labs Team
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