March 2024 Newsletter

Hello Spring
Greetings from the Cidi Labs team! Spring is here in the Northern Hemisphere, and we’re excited to tell you about all the new things that are blossoming at Cidi Labs! Read on for new resources, events, and product updates!

Please join us next Friday!

Spring Customer Gathering, Friday April 5th

Our semi-annual Customer Gathering will be held on Friday, April 5th at noon Eastern Time / 10am Mountain Time. A detailed agenda is available here, and as always, the gathering will be structured in a way that you can join for the portions that are of interest to you. Be sure to register so that we know who plans to attend!

New Resources

Missed the Cidi Spotlight?

Cidi Labs teammates Natalie Sharp and Kristin Powers role-played a meeting between a faculty member and an instructional designer to demonstrate columns, tabs, accordions, and other DesignPLUS features that help organize a Canvas page with too much content. View the recording here.

If you’d like to see more of our past webinars, you can access them all on our website.

Design Matter Digest March email image

Design Matters Digest: March Edition

Visual design can improve student engagement and motivation. This month’s edition shared some relevant research and practical tips for putting it into action. If you missed the latest edition or want to share the series with a colleague, you can access the Design Matters Blog on our website.

One-Stop Shop for New DesignPLUS Sidebar Resources

We’re excited to share a new “hub” that houses all the available resources that help you learn more about and plan your transition to the new DesignPLUS Sidebar! Check out the new resource collection here.

Product Updates

New Opt-In Beta Tools for DesignPLUS!

With the most recent release of the DesignPLUS Sidebar, we’re excited to share that we have introduced the concept of Beta tools! If you like to be on the leading edge of trying out new features and tools, you can opt in through your User Settings to gain early access to new tools in the Sidebar. When you have opted in, you will see these tools with a green beta flag. Once these tools become generally available (typically 3-4 weeks later) along with all of their related training and documentation resources, they will be marked with a green New flag so that you can easily spot them!

Example tool icons with Beta and New flags

March Product Releases

It has been another busy month for our product development team – most products had two releases in March! Be sure to check out the release notes to stay up to date on new features and bug fixes that were delivered this month.

Upcoming Events

Quality Matters and Cidi Labs present:
Instructional Designers and the Cloak of Invisibility! A Tale of Intention Hiding in Plain Sight

Step into the realm of course design superpowers and become a QM hero with our engaging session about Cidi Labs’ magical tools. You’ll learn to harness your invisibility superpowers to help faculty meet various QM standards using DesignPLUS. We will discuss ways we use hidden key action items to enhance the usability of template pages. We will also discuss ways to expose faculty to DesignPLUS incrementally by using resource courses.

EDUCAUSE Demo Day: Digital Accessibility Tools

Join us on May 21st to see UDOIT Advantage for EDUCAUSE’s demo day.

Upcoming In-Person Events

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

March 2024
WACC: 27-28 in Tacoma, WA

April 2024
OLC Innovate: 10-13 in Denver, CO

May 2024
Lincoln Legacy Teaching and Learning Community (LLTLC): 23-24 in Champaign, IL

Stay Connected

May your life blossom with unexpected joy and unscheduled playtime,

~ The Cidi Labs Team

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