July 2024 Newsletter

We’re coming to you this month fresh off of InstructureCon and super energized after connecting with so many of you! Thank you for reminding us how much we love supporting the important work you do. We look forward to continuing to deliver innovative tools that solve the challenges you’re faced with. As always, we have some exciting new resources, events, and product updates to share.

New Resources

DesignPLUS Sidebar Transition: Don’t Know Where to Start?

We’ve heard from some of you that it’s hard to know where to start with the transition to the new Sidebar. Or maybe you’re in the middle of the transition and could benefit from further guidance. Look no further! We’ve added new content in the DesignPLUS Admin Guide to suggest a sequence of activities and resources to support them.

DesignPLUS Summer School Email Series

The very popular DesignPLUS Summer School series is now available as a sequence of emails! Anyone can use this DesignPLUS Training for Educators form to kick off the sequenced email training. Please share with those at your institution who could benefit.

New Knowledge Base Articles:

Events

NEW Webinar Series!

Did you know the popular Design Matters Digest now has a LIVE sidekick? That’s right! The new monthly webinar series will bring the Digest to life, with the Cidi Labs team sharing tips and demonstrating how our tools can help bring research and action together for better online courses.

Join us to kick off the first session of our Design Matter LIVE! Series: Conquer Canvas Course Clutter

You’ll learn about the importance of clearing course clutter and watch Cidi Labs instructional designers employ TidyUP’s task-shrinking superpowers to quickly identify and remove unused Canvas course files, streamline remaining files, and develop organizational systems that makes maintenance a breeze.

Extreme Makeover: Canvas Course Edition Webinar

If you weren’t able to attend our session at InstructureCon 2024, you don’t want to miss this informative and hilarious webinar! We had a packed room in Vegas as we shared our home makeover spoof in which we transformed three customers’ Canvas courses with DesignPLUS. Register now to see the amazing transformations and jaw-dropping reveals in this webinar on August 28th at 2pm MT.

Upcoming In-Person Events

Here are the events we’ll attend in the next few months; we hope to see you there!

August 2024
COLTT: 1st in Denver, Colorado
GOCSD Innovation Summit: 1-2 in Branson, MO
EduTech: 13-14 in Melbourne, Australia
CanvasCon: 27th in Melbourne, Australia

September 2024
CanvasCon: 6th in Manila, Philippines

October 2024
CanvasCon: 8th in Barcelona, Spain

Product Updates

Recent Releases

While much of our team was busy preparing for and attending InstructureCon over the past month, our development team has been working hard to deliver several new product enhancements. Here are some highlights: DesignPLUS (Release Notes):

The ability to apply font styles to any individual element on the page
New options for Page, Module, or Course navigation
Enhancements to the Background, Callout, Columns and Module Lists tools

Cidiscape (Release Notes): Updates to the main navigation and user interface that improve the user experience To stay up to date on all product releases, be sure to join our Customer Slack Community or refer to each product’s Release notes:

New DesignPLUS Library Assets

Check out these fun new assets in the DesignPLUS Library, which you can easily import into your Customizations course.

Legacy callouts and sortable table in Snippets
New theme: Slide Rule
Content blocks from the Iowa State course makeover

Don’t forget to submit your DesignPLUS creations to the Library for a chance to win prizes and swag!

Coming Soon: DesignPLUS Course-wide Upgrade Tool

We’ve heard the feedback loud and clear – upgrading your Legacy DesignPLUS content item by item is tedious. That’s why we’ve been hard at work developing a new tool that will enable you to more efficiently upgrade your Legacy content to work with the new Sidebar, course-wide! Keep your eyes on the Release Notes for an announcement in August.

Coming Soon: Course Lifecycle Management

Did you know that our ReadyGO product is undergoing a major upgrade? The new version will enable busy instructional design teams to more effectively manage large batches of Canvas courses throughout the course lifecycle.

Whether it’s building new courses, getting courses ready for an upcoming term, or assessing the quality of courses for improvement, ReadyGO provides the data and tools you need – within Canvas – to streamline the work and scale best practices. To stay informed or express an interest in beta testing this exciting new platform, please fill out the form below.

Stay Connected

May your course designs incorporate as many best practices as our Digest,

The Cidi Labs Team