TEL Technology Roadmap Q4: Functionality & Communication

by Stacy | Oct 5, 2021 | News

At TEL, our organizational culture is built around iteration. We are always working to make our platform better and to try new functionalities for our learners and partners. For the past few months, we’ve been focusing on developing and scaling our platform. This fall, we move into our second major phase of development for our platform: adding new features and improving existing services.

Increased Functionality for Partners

We are continuing to build out new features to help our higher education and high school partners as they work with us to support their learners. This fall, we are rolling out new features to make it easier for the schools’ support staff to view their students’ progress in courses. In the spring, we will also be enabling an advanced rubric structure for manually graded assignments to provide more in-depth feedback for students.

We are adding new reports as well as new data to our existing reports for our institutional administrators and instructors. This reporting makes it possible for our partners to support their learners across the institution, not just in siloed courses. Moving forward into the spring, we will work to share more aggregated data from our system to enable backend users to see trends in student performance and progress, as well as quickly target students with support and intervention when needed.

Supporting Student Agency in Learning

One of the most important elements of being a lifelong learner is owning your learning. It is a personal mission of mine to engage learners to take an active role in their own learning experiences. This is the focus of our student dashboard.

This dashboard serves as a learning hub for students to show them the skills they are acquiring as they complete their courses. It is a place for them to reflect on their learning, such as why they did better on some assignments and courses than others, or how they can take what they have learned in one course and apply it to their life, work, and other courses.

As we move into the fall, we will be working to strengthen these types of connections in the dashboard. For example, the dashboard will enable students to view all of the different learning skills and where these skills are addressed in their course. We will surface the interconnectedness within the curriculum, breaking down course silos by showing how skills and competencies bridge subject areas.

We will continue to build out the reflective and study tools for students and encourage engagement with these powerful features.

Expanding Communication Channels

As those of you who have taught online before know, you can never be too repetitive, and there are never enough ways for students to connect to their instructors and to each other. With this in mind, we are continuing to build out communication channels within our platform, including system-triggered notifications, easier access to student coaches, additional opportunities for peer-to-peer discussions, and additional integrated communication tools.

Improved UI

We are always working to make our platform more intuitive for our users. This happens in many small iterations, such as improved course progress tracking, easier content downloads, and better grade book navigation. We are working with a design team this fall on a complete visual overhaul. We’ll receive recommendations for improved layout and graphics as well as a cleaner design and UX that we will work on implementing next year.

Increased Support for Integrations

We currently support LTI connections with our partner institutions for SSO and are planning to release our first API set at the end of the summer. We will continue to build out connection functionality to meet the needs of our partners, with plans for additional API options, deeper LTI integrations, and logins through services like Google or other social tools.

Making Learning Visible and Accessible

As we look into next year, we’re excited to find ways to make students’ experiences better through improved functionality and faster enrollment. We will also be working to provide our partners a more branded environment for their students.

If you are interested in learning more about our platform, contact us today for a demo.

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