Updates in Loops January 2021

Easier and clearer

We have reorganized and simplified the pages where you, as a teacher, work in Loops and we have created a new, requested page. When you come into Loops you will now see three clear outlines; Start Page, My Loops and My Student Overview. Under these outlines you will find the three pages (apart from the library) you will navigate between in Loops. Nowadays you find your profile by clicking your name. As a student you come directly to the Start Page where you find the loops you are working in, just like you did before. If you are authorized to build loops you will see the outline My Loops, if not, you will not see it. 

On the Start Page the loops have a green outline to show that they are active. Teachers can choose between seeing ongoing loops, loops where they are teachers or participants or closed loops. Students can only choose to see ongoing or closed loops. This is all to make things as easy as possible. 

On the page My Loops, that is your workshop and your own library, the loops have a more square shape and a blue outline, to separate them from the started loops. You now have several ways to organize your loops. You can, for example, choose to view only the ones you copied or remixed. You can also, to simplify things, use Collections as a filing system when you have many loops in your list. Choose Collections and it will remain until the next time you come here and you will be met by the view where you organized your loops.

My Student Overview is a completely new page where you can search for specific students to see all the loops they are working with, where you are their teacher. You can also see closed loops. The loops have a yellow outline here and they are significantly smaller. You can find students through their class or directly via their name. A quick glance at the progress bars of the loops will give you an idea of how your students are getting along with their work. If you want to communicate with a student in the loops, you go to the Start Page just like before.

Understanding Loops on your own

While working with the rebuild, we have also produced material that makes it possible for you as a Loops user to understand how everything works on your own. We have made a guide that unfolds to the right when you visit a page that is new to you for the first time. If you click to fold the guide, it will stay folded until you choose to open it again. The guide will tell you, in short, what you can do on that specific page. You can click around to learn the features, or click the link to our new support pages where we have submitted about 150 articles, illustrated with images, that will tell you all about how to do things. In the support pages you can use a search word and receive several suggestions, or you can navigate the headlines.

New to Loops

We have also created a new experience when you enter Loops as a new user. There is the guide that we mentioned in the last paragraph, but there is also a call to action on each of the three main pages. In each call to action you will discover the loops we have created for different target groups, where we communicate how Loops works for them specifically. There is a loop for students with two films, among other things, that tell them how to navigate in Loops and what possibilities they have to collaborate and to submit answers in a task. In Loops for teachers, we have 4 films that cover what a new teacher needs to know about how to use Loops and the loop Build a learning loop is updated and rebuilt. There is also a new loop where new users can try all the different nodes; Learn to loop.

Removed a step

A smaller change that we release now, is that we have removed one step in the process of distributing and starting a loop. Now, the started loop can be in three stages; private, active or closed. Earlier there was a preparing stage, between private and active, that many of you thought was confusing, so we removed it.

Several different layers of information that interact

Previously, Loops has been a system that has been too “quiet”. With this update, Loops becomes significantly more communicative and there are different layers of information in Loops that you can use if and when you need it. We want Loops to be a system that is easy for a new user to understand, but we also want experienced users to be able to remind themselves of different features after not using Loops for a while. 

In short you might say that the guide tells you what you can do on each page, the support pages tell you how to do it and in the loops we refer to, we tell you why by giving you the pedagogical background.

We hope you enjoy the updated version of Loops and, as usual, we are very grateful for feedback. You can write directly to our support if you have any views on what we have built now, or if you have ideas on how we can improve Loops even further.