Haiku Learning Blog

Well, it’s been a few weeks since our annual staff retreat. We were so excited to get moving on a number of updates and new features that we failed to post a blog entry about what’s coming down the line!

Why do we retreat when there is so much work to do?

Every year we take a few days to gather as a team to look at where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going. This year we revisited our mission statement, too, reshaping it to better speak to what we’re about: “To support the teaching and learning community in transforming education by providing technologies made simple.”

The retreat gives us a chance to take stock, retool a bit, and reinvigorate ourselves as we plan what’s next.

Our core values haven’t changed, and we aim to keep it that way: Harmony. Simplicity. Community.

We’re excited about where we see education and blended learning headed, and we continue to be inspired and amazed at the wonderful ideas that Haiku LMS users bring to the table. Our retreat provided us with concentrated time to evaluate the possibilities for new features and functionalities and to plan the next nine months of development.

We determined what made the cut for the next round of development based on a number of factors, with a significant amount of weight given to user requests. In fact, more than 75 percent of the items on the roadmap came from the Haiku LMS community.

Not all requests made the list, including enhancements to the calendar, dropbox, and skins. The Haiku team recognizes the needs that exist — we take suggestions to heart and keep a running list — and we want to see them happen, too, yet we acknowledge that we can’t fulfill all requests. Of course, if we see a chance to work in another feature we’ll jump at it.

Without further ado, we present to you our 2009-2010 Development Roadmap:

Late 2009 and January 2010

• * Soft Delete: Deleting the wrong thing has happened to everyone. Teachers can already delete classes, and now they can “undo” a delete to restore the class. Administrators get to specify how long the deleted classes remain behind the scenes, and they can even restore a class themselves.
• * Merge User: Oops! Looks like those two users are really the same person! Previously you had to delete one altogether, potentially losing lots of valuable data. Now you can combine two accounts so that their data is merged.
• Shadowing: Give people the access they need to see various information. You may need to enable a tutor to see his students’ discussion posts, a principal to see teachers’ curriculum, or a coach to keep an eye on her players’ grades to ensure their academic eligibility. Shadowing allows your school to provide a window for insight without granting access to every room in the house.
• Cloud Files: Moving your files to the cloud allows us to scale infinitely while keeping costs low. Initially we’ll move just a few schools to the cloud, but eventually everyone will join the party. Your data is always of upmost importance to us, and we’ll make sure it’s safe and secure from prying eyes and technical catastrophe.
• Common Cartridge: We love how much Haiku LMS users share with each other, and we as a Haiku team like to play nicely in the sandbox, too. Common Cartridge is a relatively new global standard that ensures that data from one LMS works in another. If your previous LMS was Common Cartridge (IMS) compliant, including Blackboard, Moodle and Angel Learning, you’ll be able to pull the data into Haiku LMS.
• Scheduled Publishing: Just because you created a page today and want to publish it next month doesn’t mean you have to remember to log back in to manually make it available. With Scheduled Publishing you’ll be able to specify the date a page should make itself available and, if you’d like, the date it should expire.
• Progress Reports: You have a lot of data in Haiku LMS, including grades. Reduce redundant work by generating attractive progress reports within Haiku LMS that you can send home with your students.
• Theme Management (Skins): We think of your Haiku class as yours, and we hope that you do, too. Ownership means that you should be able to hang a few pictures and paint the walls, and we’ve got plans to make this happen in several stages. The first stage of theme management is a simple workflow for your school to submit logos, fonts, and colors that we’ll use to brand your Haiku LMS installation. Farther down the road we’ll extend themes so that you, the teacher, can manage them within your Haiku class, eventually enabling even students to customize the look and feel of their own workspace.

* Soft Delete and Merge Users are already available! We told you we’d gotten right to work developing new functionality!

Early 2010

• Softchalk Integration: Softchalk is a third-party tool that enables teachers to easily create content and lessons. Once Haiku LMS integration with Softchalk is complete, you’ll be able to run your Softchalk activities within your Haiku LMS class!
• Assessments by Points: Currently assessments are by weight/percentage, and soon you’ll be able to use weights or points so that you have more flexibility in how you and Haiku grade your quizzes and tests.
• WebDAV: If you have space on your school’s network servers (and they have WebDAV resources available), WebDAV means you’ll be able to connect to your personal space from within your Haiku class. No more groaning about having left a file at school — you’ll always have it close at hand.
• Resource Library: Share and share alike. The Haiku LMS community is already terrific at sharing their knowledge, and the Resource Library is a way for them to share even more — like pages and content — with other teachers at their school or with other schools using Haiku LMS. That means you’ll be able to search for great content and use it within your class, and you can also contribute pages and content that has suited your students well.
• Additive Imports: Domain administrators will have more options beyond the current differentiated imports for user management when they attach to a student information system to better match common ways other LMS import users.
• Gradebook Interface Enhancements: We’ve received a number of suggestions and requests for the gradebook, so we’re working on a number of enhancements including a compressed view of the grid to ease data entry and export and print options to make the data portable.

Through Middle 2010

• WikiPages: Wikis enable teamwork. WikePages is a teacher-moderated space that will allow students to manage a collection of pages, which is great for collaborative learning and group work.
• Benchmarks: Set milestones that students must meet before they can move on to the next step. As simple as this may sound, there’s a lot going on here. With Benchmarks you’ll be able to facilitate self-paced learning! Create content, set up benchmarks, and specify which benchmark is required for that content to even be available. When a student meets a benchmark, the appropriate new content is released.
• Chat: Chat one-to-one or as a group with other members of your Haiku LMS class. Chat gives students another opportunity to check in with teachers and teaching assistants when they need further direction or have a question, and it also gives the teacher a chance to see what the class is talking about and to provide guidance when it’s needed.
• SCORM: Open up new horizons by running your third-party publisher SCORM activities in the SCORM player within Haiku LMS.
• Community Sites: Need a way to enable a certain group (e.g. the PTO or athletes’ parents) to communicate with each other? Use Community Sites to create places for group members to hold discussions and to distribute information.
• RSS: Give your Haiku LMS users the option of pulling updates like “What’s New” and page content from their Haiku class into a feed reader of their choice. This can be excellent for publishing PodCasts and other important news.

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We’ll keep you posted in the coming weeks and months as we roll out the new features. And you keep us posted about what’s working well and what you’d like to see improved — you can do that online at feedback.haikulearning.com!