Connect Releases

New and Coming Soon in Connect

Connect is a complete course platform that enables you to take your students further. It supports you by automating time-consuming prep work, simplifying the addition of instructors to any section, and surfacing more information with fewer clicks.

The Evergreen™^��Delivery Model

Connect uses an Evergreen delivery model to deliver new and updated content, tools, and accessibility features directly to your existing courses. This release-centered process makes using new content easy and enables digital updates without the work of a new edition.

Learn more about the Evergreen experience in Connect.

Sept/Oct/Nov 2025 Connect Release

Critical Thinking Assignment

Add custom instructions into a Critical Thinking Assignment that students can review before starting the assignment on the cover sheet.

Writing Assignment Enhancement: Multiple Drafts

You can now��assign��up to three drafts��for any given Writing Assignment.��If you assign��multiple drafts, you may��opt to have��students complete Peer Reviews on each draft or only��the final one.��

These changes allow��students��to��upload a draft at any stage and get feedback from their instructor and/or peers.��

Past Releases

June/July 2025

June/July 2025 Connect Release

AI Reader in SmartBook®

AI Reader is now available for students who launch to the Reading experience within SmartBook assignments in select titles. The instructor can select if AI Reader is enabled via the control settings on the instructor dashboard. Learn more about AI Reader here.

A message clearly displays when the AI Reader for SmartBook has been enabled or disabled in the section.

Critical Thinking Assignment Enhancements

Critical Thinking Assignment is now available in most courses across Connect, helping students to develop critical reading and analytical skills.

Enhanced accessibility updates are now live. The Process Wheel highlights new colors and patterns for enhanced accessibility compliance.

Integration Enhancement: ‘Set as Template Section for LMS’

The workflow to integrate Connect with an LMS has been streamlined with the new ability to enable the ‘Set as Template Section for LMS’ directly from the My Courses page. This feature reduces the number of clicks to enable Auto Copy Pair (ACP) in a Connect section.

Click the dropdown menu to the right of a Connect section.

Select 'Set as Template Section for LMS.'

Select template settings and select Save.

Remain on the My Courses page to quickly enable the new Connect section as a template.

Power of Process Decommissioned

The Critical Thinking Assignment has replaced the former Power of Process assignment in Connect for a more accessible and user-friendly experience. Instructors no longer see Power of Process assignments in their section and students are unable to access Power of Process assignments previously assigned.

April 2025

AI Reader Enhancements

Titles with AI Reader incorporated into their Connect eBook will now see the option to change the feature status (on/off) in the Course Materials Widget of the Section Dashboard, aligned with the eBooks available. Instructors can select a toggle for specific resources within the course, rather than a generalized button to enable or disable.

The ability to see the AI Reader status will now also be displayed directly in-line with the title of the eBook, resulting in more visibility to the instructor.

Connect System Requirements

The troubleshooting page on Connect has been updated to reflect our current system requirements. This page is helpful for both students and instructors during setup of Connect on their devices.

LTI Advantage Grade Sync Update

On the LTIA grade sync page, accessible via the LTIA widget in the LMS, instructors can now see an 'Awaiting grading' icon that indicates a learner’s submission requires grading by the instructor.

Writing Assignment Enhancement

Auto-submitted blank drafts have been removed from Writing Assignment’s Peer Review functionality. This ensures students are not prompted to do a peer review on a blank assignment.

March 2025

Student Connect Enhancement

Within the Student Connect experience, learners are now able to see additional instructors and teaching assistants who are part of their section.

LTI Advantage Integration Update

The Grade Sync page now provides instructors with additional information about student progress in Connect assessments and informs whether a student has completed the user account pairing required for grade sync.

For any Connect assessment where the student has not yet attempted the assignment, the instructor will see a red ‘stop icon’. This is now true whether the instructor has enabled ‘zeros’ for past due assignments or not.

November/December 2024

November/December 2024 Connect Release

Connect New Experience

Load all Courses
To save time from scrolling, a “Load all Courses” button now appears at the top of the My Courses page.

Roles and Permissions
More permissions are now provided to the Additional/Co-Instructor role in Connect:��

Additional Instructors can now copy assignments or sections to themselves or other instructors.
Additional Instructors can now share assignments or sections with other instructors.
Shared Co-Instructors can add additional instructors and Teaching Assistants using the “Manage users” page.

Toggle to Classic
The ability to toggle back to the Classic view of Connect is no longer available. This allows for the delivery of the most accessible product and provides additional functionalities including Media Services, Polling, and AI Reader within the platform.

Electronic Health Records

Accessibility updates were made to the Electronic Health Records (EHR) tool in Connect.

Evergreen Updates

Release Notes
Instructors may access Release Notes from the Section Dashboard or My Courses page.

Release Preview
A legend has been added to the Question Bank Release Preview to assist in defining the New/Update/Original labels.

Release Preview also extends to SmartBook and Adaptive Learning Assignment.

LMS Integration

Relinking Updates for LTI Advantage
The relinking page now has two sections:

Hidden or Unassigned assignments. If assignments cannot be relinked because they are either hidden or unassigned in Connect, this section will provide a list to instructors and provide information to get them relinked.
Manually link LMS assignments with Connect assignments. If there are any unlinked assignments in an the LMS and Connect, instructors can now manually select the assignments they want to relink.

Question Bank Enhancements

Expand and Collapse
An authoring user can now expand or collapse all questions within a bank. The collapse or expand will persist when instructors are brought back, which will help save time with fewer clicks.

Graphing Tool Accessibility
The Graphing Tool in Connect recently received a VPAT and ACR after an audit was completed and tested against WCAG 2.2 Level AA. The Graphing Tool is part of Connect’s Question Bank that allows students to plot, manipulate and analyze graphs. This question type enables students to draw endpoints, plot lines, and adjust curves to model scenarios in economics, business, engineering, and physics.

Support Chatbot

Instructor Update
The Support Chatbot in the instructor view of Connect has been enhanced for further usability by incorporating accessible design.

Student Connect
The Support Chatbot is now available in the learner experience! The chatbot is available within the platform to support students when they run into specific issues such as Assignment and Loading errors, eBook, Proctorio, and more. This is only available on the course pages of Student Connect.

October 2024

Display Performance
There are now fewer clicks to access the Performance Reports to a single dropdown menu.

Roles and Permissions
Multiple permissions are now provided to the Additional Instructor in Connect:

Pair and reset pairing via Learning Management System (LMS): Additional Instructors and Shared Instructors can now pair a section through their LMS where they are co-instructors. They are also able to reset the section pairing for sections where they are co-instructor.
Manage users: The Additional Instructor can add and remove additional instructors and teaching assistants from the Connect section.

Evergreen Experience

Preview Updates
Instructors are now able to preview updates to Adaptive Learning Assignments, SmartBook, and Question Banks before a Release becomes available.

Upcoming Release Notifications

LMS Integration

LTI Advantage
The resync feature will now sync automatic 0s as part of the grade resync process. When students don't start an exam and the due date passes, they receive a score of 0 (automatic 0s) for their exam.

Video Capture

Reopen Assignment
Instructors are now able to reopen Video Capture by GoReact™ assignments when giving students extensions in the Connect Individual Assignment Extensions page. This will only be available for individual Video Capture assignments.

To access the Reopen Assignment feature, select the assignment title from the Assignments list in Connect.

Select the Manage Extensions option on the Student Activity page.

Once on the individual assignment extensions page, the instructor will be shown the list of students for the course. Select the students from the list and a checkbox titled “Reopen Assignment” will be available for the instructor to select.

There will be an info icon next to the title of the checkbox that describes that only Video Capture assignment types are currently available for Reopen.

The instructor will then be able to add an Extension for the student(s) and reopen the assignment for the selected student(s). Note: If the Due Date has already passed for any of the students in the course, the instructor needs to add an extension to successfully reopen the assignment.

Writing Assignment

Manage and Shift Dates
Instructors are now able to use Manage and Shift dates for Writing Assignments.

July 2024

Critical Thinking Assignment Launch

A new assignment type, Critical Thinking Assignment, helps guide students through the process of critical reading and analysis before, during, and after reading. It can be built with embedded scaffolding, or on its own and provides the practice students need to read real-world texts analytically and critically by guiding them through the thinking required for deep understanding. Note: Currently this feature is available in limited products.��

Connect screenshot showing Critical Thinking Assignment header.

Roles and Permissions

Multiple instructors can now be added in shared sections. Previously, only sections that were not shared were allowed to have multiple instructors. Instructors can be added to the shared section from standalone Connect or the Learning Management System (paired with LTIA or deep integration).

SmartBook® and Adaptive Learning Assignment

Accuracy of time estimates have been improved by basing them on historical student completion times (including time spent reading in the assignment) of each specific title. There is no change to assignment content. Time estimates have been slightly adjusted and will continue to adjust based on data.

Note: Prior to this update, ��Vlog has relied on a universal 90 seconds to answer each learning objective within SmartBook and Adaptive Learning Assignments. The new time estimates are within 5% of the original estimates.

Connect screenshot showing SmartBook and Adaptive Learning Assignment

June 2024

Connect New Experience

Assignment Page Filter

Instructors can now filter the assignment page in the New Experience by Assignment Type. Filter selections made by the instructor persist, so each time you access your Assignment page they do not have to reconfigure.

With the new assignment page filter:

1.�� Instructors can filter by Assignment Type.

2.�� Filter selections persist at the user level.

Connect screenshot showing Assignment Page Filter

Default New Experience

Instructors (and co-instructors) will now default to the Connect New Experience. When an instructor (or co-instructor) navigates to Connect, you will always be taken to the New Experience. The toggle will remain available until December 2024, and instructors may switch to the Classic experience for that specific session, however each subsequent login will default to the New Experience. This applies to LMS launches as well as login to standalone Connect.

Manage Dates Enhancements

Connect now enables late submission dates that were updated correctly via Manage Dates, and flag those that were not with a pop-up notification for instructor review. This will enable instructors to continue the update on correctly dated assignments, while only omitting assignments that were configured incorrectly.

Connect screenshot showing Late Submission Date

a.�� When an instructor submits a new date in the Manage Dates page, the above notification will appear if any assignments have issues.

b.�� Clicking ‘ok’ will allow the instructor to proceed with their changes except for assignments listed in the notification.

c.�� Clicking ‘cancel’ will cancel the process and none of the previously selected assignments will be updated.

Media Services Enhancements

Media Archive Update

Instructors can filter the archived media list view based on dates and type of media. Media archived in the past 30 calendar days is displayed. To see older archived media, use the date range filter.

Usage Reports

Section level and Individual Media level usage reports are now available to instructors. Detailed reports provide information of Total View, Unique View, 100^ View, Partial View, Link View, Student Resource View, and Student Like/Dislike.

Connect screenshot showing New media Services Enhancements

May 2024

Connect New Experience

Archive Tab

Sections created before January 1, 2020, can now be accessed on a new Archive tab on the My Courses page. (Previously, these older courses were only available in Classic Connect.) After an instructor accesses an Archived course, it will be moved to the Current tab on the My Courses page.

Connect screenshot showing New media Services

Duplicate Course

Duplicate course is now available in the New Experience.

When duplicating a course, instructors also have the option to select which Sections to include, allowing for more flexibility in course creation.

Performance Reports

A new submenu in the Performance dropdown gives instructors easy, one-click access to Connect Reports directly from the Section Dashboard.

Evergreen Experience

Any courses or sections created before the release date of June 3, 2024, will maintain the content version available at the time of creation. Any updates made to the eBook, SmartBook, Adaptive Learning Assignment, Reading Assignment, and Question Bank content will not flow to existing sections created before the release. Any new sections created on or after the release date will automatically update to the latest release. This means updated eBook, SmartBook, Adaptive Learning Assignment, Reading Assignment, and Question Bank content will flow. Sections can be created by:
1. Duplicate

2. Add new section

3. Create new course

4. (Copy to colleague)

When students register to a Connect section, they will access the version of content being used in their instructor’s course. There is no change to student registration, purchase, assignment launches, or other flows.

LMS Integration

The Connect New Experience now fully supports MHCampus Classic and BlackBoard (Learn) building block integrations. Instructors can access existing sections from the My Courses page and add new courses. Features include:

Add course workflow for BlackBoard building block integration.
Add course workflow for MH Campus legacy integration.
Paired status on My Courses page in section title.
Paired status on Section Dashboard in the Section Information.
Back-to-School banner navigation on all pages.
Deploy option and launch to BlackBoard Learn.

Media Services

Poll in Media Player

Instructors are now able to understand if their media was helpful with a thumbs up/down poll: “Did you find this media helpful?”. Instructors can view poll results in the media usage tab.

Media Archive

When an instructor removes media from the ‘All Media’ list view, it will be added to an Archive tab, where it can be restored. Media will appear in the archive for 30 days after it is removed.

April 2024

Add Course Enhancement

A new experience within the Add Course page provides instructors with a streamlined course creation process, beginning with utilizing the search function to select the ISBN of relevant materials, followed by course and section details—in two simple steps. This enhanced Add Course capability is available for LMS LTIA and Deep Integration types.��

Instructors will be launched to the new add course workflow from the My Courses page.

Search can be done by discipline, title, author, or ISBN and results will show accordingly. When searching by discipline, book titles will be sorted alphabetically, A-Z. Search results return 10 per page.

Instructors now have the capability to refine search results to specific parameters such as Discipline, Author, or Publication year.

Once course is selected, instructors can begin entering course and section details to create the course and section.

Connect screenshot showing new instructor experience

A confirmation page will appear with section details upon the successful addition of the course and a button to navigate to the section dashboard.��

LTI Advantage Updates

LTIA Assignment Deploy

Assignments deployed to the Learning Management System (LMS) will now appear in the same order as in Connect. Instructors simply need to create their Connect section, organize the assignments in the desired structure, and deploy.
Note: Changes in the order of assignments in Connect after deployment will not be synced to the LMS, and changes made to the order of assignments in the LMS will not impact the order in Connect.

Auto-Copy-Pair to Self

Instructors can now use the ‘Auto Copy Pair’ functionality with LTIA to create sections for themselves. This delivers a template capability to individual users and reduces the overhead of section creation by allowing users to create multiple sections quickly.

Media Services Enhancement

The ‘Add media to another section’ feature has been updated for enhanced accessibility and improved user experience.

Video Capture Powered by GoReact™��UI Enhancements

A newly launched user interface for GoReact provides upgraded accessibility and a more streamlined view. Users are now launched, by default, to landing pages with a grid view to ensure the video details are visible on smaller screens more easily. Other actions have also been placed more prominently on the page and renamed to be more intuitive,��including “Archive” and “Start Activity”.

March 2024

GoReact Student Submission Update

When coming from an LTI Advantage Learning Management System (LMS), instructors are now able to view the link on GoReact assignments when they navigate to the student activity page via a GoReact assignment link. When a GoReact assignment is in-progress or the student submitted the assignment, the instructor can grade the attempt by going to the student activity page and clicking on the ‘Grade student submissions’ link.

Teaching Assistant Reports

Teaching Assistants in Connect are now able to view all of the Student performance report, including the Time Spent column with the ability to export.

Question Bank Update: Late Submission feature

Instructors can now easily shift start date, due date, and late submission date together from the Shift Dates page in Connect. With the inclusion of Late Submission Date, instructors can shift all corresponding dates of their assignment(s) by either a number of days, weeks, or months, making the copying or sharing of assignments easier for sections that have different schedules.

Media Services Enhancements

Usage Data

Instructors can now see a Usage tab on the Edit Media pages, which provides data about student usage of the media.

Media Filter

Instructors can filter their media by public or private embed link, based on the setting on the Edit Media page.

A filter icon has been updated on the All Media page.

Student View

A button to the Student view has been added to the All Media page, so instructors no longer need to navigate back to the Section Dashboard.

February 2024

Media Services Enhancements

Instructors can now map media to multiple sections within a course—and make media visible to their students as a resource at the same time.

Media can now be removed from a section (aka "soft delete").��

Instructors can now create public embed links. Instructors will toggle between public and private settings when creating a link. When 'Private' is selected, instructors and students must log in to Connect to view the media. When 'Public' is selected, anyone may view the media from this link. When an instructor launches the embed link from the kebab menu on the media list, the title will read URL (Public) or URL (Private) based on this setting.

Titles of media will be retained upon upload and download.

Media will now be sorted alphabetically for both the student resources and instructor media list view. Instructors will retain the ability to sort by created and modified dates.

Buttons have been added to initiate the dialogue boxes in the browser and sequence them in a way that is more transparent.

For the best and most stable recording experience, it is recommended to use Chrome or Edge browsers. A notification will appear for instructors when attempting to record from Safari or Firefox.

December 2023

December 2023 Connect Release

New! Media Services in Connect

Instructors can now capture and manage media right in Connect. Video and audio files can be uploaded or captured directly in Connect for a seamless experience to provide students with recorded lectures and content.��

Easily search, filter, and sort media, and add accessibility features including captions.��

Students can also access shared media in their view.

New Experience Updates

My Courses page

Instructors are now able to move up to 10 sections at one time from ‘Current’ to Previous, and ‘Previous’ to ‘Current’.��

Sections in the Previous tab can now be accessed directly from the Previous tab.��

Instructor Dashboard Enhancements

The instructor dashboard will now contain both a student registration link and QR Code, which can be shared with students for a quicker and easier registration process. Note: This link is for sections not paired with a Learning Management System (LMS).��

The registration link is now collapsed for LMS-paired courses. (Sections paired with an LMS will need students to register via the LMS.)��

Student Registration Updates

Courses using Deep Integration for their LMS course pairings are now added to the new checkout and registration flow that is in use for LTIA-paired courses and Standalone Connect courses. This streamlined registration saves students time and allows for additional checkout options, including PayPal and Venmo.��

Connect screenshot showing student registration update

Teaching Assistant Role

The Teaching Assistant (TA) role is now available through LMS Deep Integration.��

����Vlog

New and Coming Soon in Connect

The Evergreen™��Delivery Model

Sept/Oct/Nov 2025 Connect Release

Critical Thinking Assignment

Writing Assignment Enhancement: Multiple Drafts

Past Releases

June/July 2025 Connect Release

AI Reader in SmartBook®

Critical Thinking Assignment Enhancements

Integration Enhancement: ‘Set as Template Section for LMS’

Power of Process Decommissioned

AI Reader Enhancements

Connect System Requirements

LTI Advantage Grade Sync Update

Writing Assignment Enhancement

Student Connect Enhancement

LTI Advantage Integration Update

November/December 2024 Connect Release

Connect New Experience

Electronic Health Records

Evergreen Updates

LMS Integration

Question Bank Enhancements

Support Chatbot

Evergreen Experience

LMS Integration

Video Capture

Writing Assignment

Critical Thinking Assignment Launch

Roles and Permissions

SmartBook® and Adaptive Learning Assignment

Connect New Experience

Media Services Enhancements

Connect New Experience

Evergreen Experience

LMS Integration

Media Services

Add Course Enhancement

GoReact Student Submission Update

Teaching Assistant Reports

Question Bank Update: Late Submission feature

Media Services Enhancements

Media Services Enhancements

December 2023 Connect Release

New! Media Services in Connect

New Experience Updates

Student Registration Updates

Teaching Assistant Role

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��Vlog

The Evergreen™^��Delivery Model

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