How was this framework design decided? Was student feedback taken into account?

We conducted a general student survey regarding online learning in Spring 2021. Students identified need for a consistent way of finding things from course to course. The specific framework design was decided upon based on feedback from many levels. We started our process by looking at how colleges are organized inside of their current D2L environment. What we found is that, although everybody was doing very similar things, they were in different places and looked slightly different from each other. All colleges are using most of the main tools in the main navigation bar, but some colleges are organized differently. For instance, Front Range uses navigational groupings. We followed the same process to look at how colleges were organized and what types of things they were including on their course home pages. Again, everybody was doing very similar things, organized in slightly different ways. We took a visual look at what was happening across the system, and at information from D2L. We designed our framework around the most commonly used tools across the system. Content, discussion, and assignments were clearly high use tools. In the fall we took the initial prototype of the framework out to faculty, instructors, and staff across the system for feedback. You may remember being asked to provide some feedback on the common course framework via video, as well as being able to login and navigate around, providing feedback on a quick survey. From that feedback we refined what we included in the common course framework. One of the things we heard as part of that feedback, for example, is folks said that we’re missing course home, where is course home, my students use this a lot, I use this a lot, I would like to see it as part of the common course navigation bar – so we added it. Other comments were around arrangement of widgets on the home pages. Faculty also identified announcements as really critical for interaction with students – could that be moved up. We made modifications based on that feedback and shared the revised framework with a variety of different stakeholder groups, including the Online Faculty and Instructor Advisory Committee. Opportunities for student feedback after the initial survey included student representatives on the project team, as well as faculty and staff who work directly with students. The Technology team also reached out to SSAC for feedback on determining whether to use internal or external messaging in D2L.