If you’ve visited the Microsoft Educator Community lately, you may have noticed that things look a little different. We’re delighted to announce that the entire site has been restructured to better support educators around the world, and it’s all thanks to you every new button, navigation path, and design update was made not only with educators in mind, but also using the feedback received from over 300 teachers around the world.
Not only do we want to celebrate and introduce the features made possible through the input of our users, we want to thank them for their important role in helping to restructure the site. Whether through in-person interviews at the E2 (Educator Exchange) Conference in Budapest this year, or through live presentations done on Skype for Business, we have incorporated countless pieces of feedback from our user studies to produce an Educator Community that is more efficient, personalized, and intuitive. We hope these changes help create more supportive, continuous journeys on the site, helping teachers consume more content that help them in their professional development.
1. A more efficient Educator Community
Teachers have enough on their hands, juggling class time, lesson preparation, grading, and a myriad of other time-consuming tasks. The restructured Educator Community was designed to make navigation a breeze and save valuable time:
- The categories and subcategories have been reorganized so that all sections of the site are easily accessible.
- You can now hover over content tiles to get more information about it before you click, as well as click to up vote, comment, and share while on the hover screen.
- A filter button is there when you want it to help you find the exact piece of content you want quickly– when you don’t need it, simply hide it with one click.
- The homepage now arranges content more efficiently to minimize scrolling; immediately see featured, new, and popular content to find relevant, engaging content right away.
2. A more personalized Educator Community
We recognize that every educator has unique needs that differ based on geography, subject, age group, and interest. When you access the Educator Community, you want to find content that’s relevant to you, and that’s now easier than ever:
- Personalized content recommendations, made possible by Azure Machine Learning, now appear when you consume courses and content to offer suggestions for next steps in your journey based on your needs and interests.
- The site is organized to suit the needs of educators with different goals, organized under four personas — Training and professional development-focused, Information Seekers, Skypers, and Contributors. The new navigation is built to simplify discoverability for each persona, serving different needs of different educators in the best way.
- With the updated Learning Path summary, a checkbox will appear next to completed courses, and an icon next to those in progress, so you know exactly where you are on your journey. A description will also appear on the overview page, along with creation date, duration, and status.
3. A more easily discoverable Educator Community
One of the main pieces of feedback we heard was the desire for more supported, continuous journeys on the site. With that in mind, we’ve made various changes in educator’s browsing experience that support this—
- A new community navigation menu along the left side of your screen is always there to make sure you never get lost– no more going back to the home page to find another section. Don’t need it? Simply select “Community Menu” again to hide it.
- Always know where you are with color-coded categories and a new consistency to the structure of different pages on the site.
Check out the improvements on the Educator Community and continue your learning journey today!