2023 was a huge building year for us, and 2024 will be one where we can start adding great new stuff on top of the new scaffold. We’re excited to let you know what’s on the horizon!

New VoiceThread

New VoiceThread is here, and we’re very excited! This is a major enhancement that will significantly increase human connectedness for both students and educators with its new accessibility features, a simplified design, and some significant new affordances.

For the next 5 months, we will be helping each institution make the transition to New VoiceThread on their own terms and timeline. You can flip the switch for your users any time between now and June 30, 2024.

To help you plan this transition, we’ve developed a number of supportive tools, from training materials and webinars to customized training sessions. To get you started, we have built a VoiceThread room to collaborate with you. The room starts off with a succinct 8 min overview, and because it’s a VoiceThread, we can always add more slides to help answer any questions you come up with. You can also read a full breakdown of the new features here.

To try it out now on your own personal account, just go to your display preferences page and select “New VoiceThread.” We’re big fans of self-paced change, so you can also go back to the same place to switch back to the legacy version of VoiceThread any time. Legacy VoiceThread will be supported until summer 2024.

New login options

Logging in isn’t exciting, but it’s enormously important! Smooth access is key to success, and more thought and work goes into that than you might think. In 2023 we introduced a redesign of our core login page to make it simpler for people to get where they need to go, as well as introduce a “Sign in with Apple” and “Sign in with Google” option for people wanting to access individual accounts without creating a separate password.

Assignments updates

Graded assignments are a powerful way to ask your students to complete specific tasks and receive a grade right in your LMS. This year we introduced the ability to grade students who haven’t begun to do any work (because sometimes you’ll want a policy of zero for this outcome, but sometimes not) and updated the watch assignment to help students see exactly which slides and comments they still need to watch in order to receive credit.

We have lots of great stuff on the horizon! And this year, we’re breaking down our plans a little differently. We have some things that we’re definitely working on this year and then some things that we really hope to finish by the end of the year but can’t yet be sure. Those less definite items are labeled “Bonus” below.

Full rollout of new VT

You already know that the new VoiceThread experience is available to everyone. You can transition over to that new version any time between now and June 30. If you haven’t opted into the new version by that date, we’ll be switching you over automatically.

Accessibility Updates

• Dark mode: For people who need or prefer a dark background.
• New in-line hinting workflow for new commenters.
• Bonus: Ability to edit captioning chunk timings and create new ones.
• Bonus: Overhaul of the “Manager” for license admins to have full screen reader and keyboard accessibility.

Content Management

• Delete, edit, and share VoiceThreads in bulk
• New button in comment window to copy a link to a specific comment
• New activity feed that includes more than just comments
• Drag-and-drop to share VoiceThreads with groups, courses, or ThreadBoxes
• Updated course interface and sections to better organize content within a course
• Course-level analytics
• Add tracks/sections/channels to ThreadBoxes to help organize larger conferences
• Bonus: Drag-and-drop to delete VoiceThreads

Assignments

• Customize when and how students can see the Student Gallery in Create Assignments
• Require students to comment on a classmate’s submission for a grade in a Create Assignment
• Bonus: Group assignments
• Bonus: Rubric grading
• Bonus: Support for “submitted” status with an LMS gradebook integration

Mobile

• Full mobile browser support, so a separate VoiceThread app is not required at all
• Ability to grade assignments on mobile devices

Login

• Ability to sign in with Microsoft

New licensing option

• “Student pay” mode for institutions that ask students to purchase their own access to VoiceThread