Quarterly Newsletter - April 2023
This month was an exciting milestone for the Cidi Labs team. We held our first in-person team gathering to celebrate that we now work with over 500 institutions across the globe. We are so grateful to each one of you! We promise to stick to our values and grow with intention as we continue to serve more and more institutions worldwide. Read to the bottom to see our team photo silliness.
🎉 UDOIT Updates Released 🎉
On April 13th, we released a set of updates and improvements to UDOIT Advantage including reporting updates, file scanning improvements, and bug fixes.
Read the full list of changes in the Release Notes.
🏙️ Cidiscape 🏙️
Cidiscape is a new, forthcoming tool from Cidi Labs that will provide you with a bird’s eye view of the activity happening within your Cidi Labs tools across courses in your Canvas account. The tool will be available at no charge to all Cidi Labs customers when it is released. We’re very pleased to let you know that Cidiscape beta testing is beginning this week, with over 15 institutions testing the tool! Once we gather this important feedback, we’ll be able to share more about when we’ll be ready to release it. Stay tuned!
Success Strategies For Your Accessibility Journey
At Cidi Labs, we believe that accessibility is a journey, not a destination. We know that there are an endless number of ways that you can continue to improve the methods and outcomes for enhancing the level of accessibility in your online courses. That’s why we recently held a panel discussion, featuring three accessibility champions who shared the strategies, tips, and the most helpful lessons learned in their institutions’ accessibility journey. We’re pleased to present a summary of the wealth of knowledge and experience that was shared in this lively discussion, which covered three major topics.
We just launched Cidi Signals on LinkedIn!
We are lucky to work with a community of course design superheroes who are doing unbelievable things on their campuses. Cidi Signals will share stories from our customers with lessons for accessibility, quality course design, and student engagement. Read our first story with Amanda Jacob, Director of Online Learning at Northshore Technical Community College, who shares how TidyUP reduced faulty stress and helped her battle Canvas course clutter. Subscribe with the link below.
See UDOIT Live from Educause Demo Day- Digital Learning Tools
Thursday, April 27th we participated in Educause’s Demo Day and showed off the amazing features of UDOIT Advantage. If you missed it, we’ve got the video up now (captions are forthcoming).
Community Action
📝 Calling All Creatives!📝
Are you a creative soul with a passion for design? Do you want to showcase your skills and have a chance to be recognized by the Cidi Labs community? Look no further than our Creative Theme Contest! This is your chance to create a custom Canvas theme and enter it in our contest for a chance to win big. The contest is open to all Cidi Labs customers, and we’ll be selecting multiple winners. You don’t even have to build the theme in Canvas to enter– we’ll accept images of your theme idea! Read the full details, and enter the contest with the link below.
🛡️ Do you feel like a course design superhero with Cidi Labs tools? 🛡️
Our mission is to empower course designers and educators to easily and quickly create impactful, accessible learning experiences for all students. We want to hear from those of you who have stories to tell about how Cidi Labs products have helped you do more than you thought possible – maybe even equipped you with superpowers like these:
- Task shrinking: Making difficult or time-consuming tasks become small and do-able in the blink of an eye
- Barrier Blasting: Easily removing barriers to designing accessible, effective learning for all students
- Course-ray Vision: Seeing deeply into and across courses to quickly detect and address readiness issues that impact student success
- And more!
Please let us know if you’re willing to share your story by co-presenting with us at a conference, on a webinar, or in a case study. In addition to the opportunity to interact with Cidi Labs staff, you’ll also get some super cool swag.
🗓️ Upcoming Events 🗓️
Come see us in person at one of these exciting conferences this year. Next stop: Illinois!
- FSI May 23- 24th
- Mississippi eLearning Retreat June 6-8
- California Community Colleges Online Teaching Conference June 21-23
- ICON July 26-28
- GOCSD August 3-4
- OLC Accelerate October 24-27
- QM Connect November 6-8
Connect With Us Online
Connect with Cidi Labs through one of our many social channels to stay up to date with events and news. We also have a Slack community for customers to ask each other questions and share resources.
Thank you for making Cidi Labs your solution for Course Design Superpowers!
– The Team at Cidi Labs
