? Student preview for assignments is here!

Hi all,

I'm very excited to share that this morning, we released a highly-requested feature in the LMS: a student-view version of assignments for teachers. You can get the full details in our September 14 What's New letter, but I also wanted to take a moment to share the backstory and highlights here.

We heard from you, both in the community and through our My Day call for feedback, that the new assignment details design interrupted a workflow that many of you had previously used: screensharing or projecting an assignment for students. While the new assignment details view for faculty was built to give you increased information about students when grading, we learned from you that there were two outstanding needs:

• The ability to see how an assignment will actually look and feel for students
• The ability to display an assignment for students without revealing student information

Student preview aims to meet both these needs. To access it, click the context menu for an assignment or discussion and click See student preview:

This will lead you to a new page that is a close approximation of how students will see the assignment. There is NO student information displayed from this view. Descriptions, downloads, and links are fully shown and functional.

A heads up: your students may note that the page doesn’t exactly look like their current experience when you screenshare. This is true: there are currently some differences in design and functionality, such as the lack of a student submission area in Student preview. Other differences are unavoidable: LTI links aren't shown in this view because students and teachers have inherently different experiences of those tools. Through future releases, we will work to make sure the student experience is more closely aligned with the Student preview interface.

While some items are still coming soon to Student preview, like rubrics and discussion threads, we hope even the current functionality helps you and your students to feel more informed and comfortable when it comes to discussing assignments. If you’ve got further ideas or feedback, we’d love to hear it.

Huge thank you to everyone who took the time to voice this need over the past few weeks. We look forward to sharing more updates soon!

Best,

Ben