Have Your Say: Monthly Release Courses

  • 30 April 2021
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Userlevel 6
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Things move fast around here! :rocket:

With so many exciting new updates in our Learn platform as well as a growing product suite, this year we decided to begin orienting you to what’s changing, what this means for your operations, and where you can learn more about our new features and functionalities.  :newspaper::mag::bulb:

We kicked off in January, and have been developing these courses on a monthly cadence ever since then. :raised_hands:

Now that April’s release course is safely in the rearview mirror, we’d love to hear from you, the customers. We want the truth!

 

(And yes, we can handle the truth…)

So, we’d love to know:

Are you taking these release courses?

Have you found them useful? If we didn’t have them, what (if anything!) would you miss?

What do you like about them? What would you change about them?

How could we bring more value to these courses?

 

Be sure to take the April release course if you haven’t. And if you’ll fill out the Learning Impact survey we send your way, we’ll be able to track the effectiveness of our efforts!


6 replies

Userlevel 7
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Hey Ryan!

I have been taking the courses.  

They have been useful in that I know they are the one place that will link me to all of your available resources on new features (for example the section on DLI this month linked us to the KB, pages in Docebo University and the monthly release page).  The longer demo videos are helpful as well.  I’m very visual, so reading about a new feature in a KB article doesn’t have the same impact as watching a video about the new feature.

The only thing I would think about changing would be the Try it Yourself.  It throws me a little bit because I guess I am expecting to have a little scenario that we can use to set up and test the new feature? Or maybe having video or image after the You Try It button letting me know if it looks or behaves a certain way, then I know I set up the new feature correctly. Considering how there are so many different uses for the platform, I know that might be a little difficult.

But otherwise, thank you so much for putting them together and making them available to us!  They have been helpful in supporting the new release cadence of the platform.  

Userlevel 6
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Thanks, @Annarose.Peterson! And I like the idea of making the Try It Yourself more concrete. Will have to consider how I can create those in a way that’s both tangible and generalized enough to scale… :thinking:

Userlevel 7
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Thanks, @Annarose.Peterson! And I like the idea of making the Try It Yourself more concrete. Will have to consider how I can create those in a way that’s both tangible and generalized enough to scale… :thinking:

@ryan.woods maybe you should ask the community for some ideas! :joy:

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Hey Ryan! 
 

Let me start by saying….NEVER GET RID OF THESE COURSES! They are great! It’s nice to be able to go back to a course and hold myself accountable for learning content in the same way I could expect my staff to go into the system and learn about new features or updates! With that said, I still need to go back and get caught up on a few early ones I missed!

With that said, here are a few suggestions I can think of: 

  1. Try it yourself - I think you mean for us to jump into our platform, but let’s be real, I don’t! :wink: You may suggest it, but remove it as a button similar to Annarose it’s confusing. 
  2. Paid update - I won’t get all the way on my soapbox with this one, but lots of times these announcements come about new features/products but fail to mention (until I am excited about it) that it will cost me before I can use! Maybe add a heads up at the top of the sections that explain if a feature is an enhancement, and if it’s included in our package, or if it’s an add on item we can reach out to our rep for more information on. 
  3. Timing - While I greatly appreciate the updates after something is live having these before something is live in my system would be amazing...help me understand it before my users are asking me questions. I’m sure that’s not always possible, but just a suggestion. There have been several pain points for us lately with updates going out before we have time to customize or prepare for people to see it. 
  4. Photo’s, short videos and Interactive Content - just wanted to mention I love it! 
  5. Comments/Questions - not sure if it is something that would be easily managed, but if I have a question regarding a feature or release in a particular course/update I would like to list it right there on the course landing page for the course. (see attachment, adding to test this update in the Community :grin:
  6. Summary - getting picky here, but how about a summary or a ‘looking ahead’ section to end the course, give a little more closure to us, or get us excited about the upcoming month!

@Salvo @lrnlab @abartunek @Cindy McElhinney what do you all think about these? 

Userlevel 6
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@ryan.woods thanks for soliciting feedback and thank you to @Stephanie Dreiling for writing up such detailed thoughts about the courses. I pretty much agree with everything. Here are a few of my thoughts:

  1. Try it yourself. This might serve as a nudge to some but for me, I’m already motivated to jump in and try out those features that are relevant and/or a priority for us. As @Annarose.Peterson said maybe a scenario showing a real-life use case would help. I always appreciate real examples rather than “test” if you know what I mean:wink:  Though I think it’s key to balance any of that with keeping it short. I know this is tricky because some want longer and more detailed but I appreciate shorter courses. Now that we have the community, discussion can take place on new features among many at great length:slight_smile:
  2. I like @Stephanie Dreiling suggestions on comments. Not sure whether you want to allow a Q&A on the course which would be okay with me or whether you want to have a discussion topic in the community about releases, seems like that would work too. With the latter you could link back to the course so that would help others in the community who might not be currently checking out the course.
  3. And like @Stephanie Dreiling I would love a quick look ahead and of course we would understand any caveat that it’s subject to change.

I’d also say that I love the monthly release readiness webinar. Between the two I feel well informed of new features. 

And I really just have to give Docebo props for moving to monthly releases. As customers, rapid deployment of new features is key and we have benefited from many of them. Thanks!

 

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Are you taking these release courses? Yes!!! They are extremely helpful. 

Have you found them useful? If we didn’t have them, what (if anything!) would you miss? Very useful. I am a visual and kinesthetic learner, so they are much more helpful than having to read the release summary.

What do you like about them? What would you change about them? I like the video demonstrations and I LOVE the use cases. I also appreciate the links to the full documentation throughout the training. I would even love more detail such as important notes, pros/cons to implementation, use cases, suggestions for implementation, before and after photos/demos.

How could we bring more value to these courses? Include a little more information on how to setup new features (like you did with the Skills training). Always explain the WHY for a new feature/change. Sometimes, we may not understand how the change will improve our experience within the platform.

Provide a ROADMAP that customers can reference for the upcoming year. Even if it is 200 pages, trust me, I would read it! 

Release Idea - A challenge for me is not being able to “decline” specific system changes. Sometimes, a change may require us to update all of our documentation, or it might break a current process. Something another LMS provider did well with releases is they added the changes to a Release Portal within the LMS platform (kind of like the Add New Apps Section) where you could elect to push a change to your Production environment. This was helpful because it would allow you to conduct thorough testing before adding it to your environment. You could also choose not to add new features to your Platform. For each release, they held a live webinar, provided eLearning courses, and a huge reference guide. Within the guide, it would show each release feature and it would indicate if the change would be pushed to everyone or optional. Just a thought! 

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