What's New for Fall 2015

[becky_anderson]

After a rigorous analysis of customer support tickets, conversations with our field sales personnel and digital support specialists, and extensive interviews and testing with students and instructors (users and non-users), we decided to focus on the following areas for LaunchPad improvements for Fall 2015: onboarding, assignment journey, and video assignment tools.

Onboarding:

• Improvements to the eCommerce flow, so that students can more quickly buy direct access to LaunchPad
• Due to student feedback, changing references to temp access to "free trial access"
• Adding student messaging that clarifies when a user's free trial access will expire, so if I'm a student and I have free trial access, each day that I log in to the product, I'll see a counter at the top of LaunchPad saying 20 days, 19 days, 18 days, etc.
• Moving the system check from the login screen to the eCommerce screen - this system check on the LaunchPad sign in page was distracting users from logging into our product and was a frequent tech support complaint

Assignment Journey:

• Expanding the clickable area in the assignment list to make loading an assignment easier
• Allowing instructors to set the student view of letter/point/percent grade or any combination thereof
• Removing the marketing banner from interior pages of the product (welcome page, dashboard, home page)

Video Assignment Tool

• Instructors can create video assignments requiring that students have to upload or embed their own videos
• Instructors can create video assignments requiring that students add time-based comments on videos
• For disciplines with a video library, instructors can create video assignments requiring that students add time-based comments on publisher-supplied videos
• Instructors can use rubrics to grade video assignments
• You can learn more here: What is a Video Assignment? | LaunchPad Instructor's Manual | Macmillan Media for Instructors 

Let us know what you think of these changes!