COMMS Product Roadmap

Organizations can control which reports are visible to their users in COMMS. A settings card on the Organization -- Settings page allows administrators to choose which reports to show or hide, helping ensure that only relevant reports are displayed to the user community.

A new setting named CLO/EoP List Style allows colleges to choose how Elements of Performance are displayed under each Course Learning Outcome—either as bullet points (default) or as a numbered list (e.g., 1.1, 1.2, 2.1) for improved structure and clarity.

To improve clarity and reduce confusion during the course outline approval process, the COMMS Dashboard will be updated to display the current Academic Year prominently at the top of the page. This enhancement ensures users are always aware of which Academic Year their work pertains to when interacting with workflow-related content. The academic year label will appear only when the user has content requiring approval, maintaining a clean interface for others.

The Course Description Summary report was available in COMMS 2 but was not initially ported to COMMS 3 due to low usage during the migration period. A need for this report has since been identified.
This work will reintroduce the report in COMMS 3, maintaining the original structure and functionality. This ensures continued support for users who rely on this reporting capability.

To better support operational and reporting needs, this work enables the Enhanced Learning Resource Module Summary report to be run at the department level in addition to the program level.

Users currently receive separate emails for each action or notification in the system, which can result in excessive and overwhelming communication. Multiple colleges have flagged this as a significant usability issue.

This work item aims to improve the user experience by consolidating notifications into a configurable email digest. Instead of immediate, individual messages, users will receive a summary email containing multiple notifications.

Key features:

• Digest-style emails replace individual alerts.
• Users can enable/disable digest emails and configure their frequency.
• Users can configure which types of emails to include in the digest.

Improve the clarity and consistency of action icons (edit, delete, move) that appear when editing lists in various outline sections. The icons will be aligned to the right and ordered uniformly to create a cleaner, more user-friendly interface. This change enhances usability for users when managing course outline content in COMMS.

The Evaluation Type Usage report helps users track how frequently each Evaluation Type is used across course outlines within a selected academic year. This feature supports better management of the reusable Evaluation Types list.

Key Features:

• Location: Accessible from the Academic Year Details page.
• Contents: The report displays:
• Evaluation Type
• Count of outlines using each type in the selected academic year

Users can already filter for Electives and General Education Courses when editing outcome maps directly, but these filters are missing when using the Map Revisions (submit/review) workflow. This enhancement will add the same filtering options to the Map Revisions interface, ensuring consistency and improving usability across both mapping workflows.

Summary

This enhancement improves clarity and usability for academic staff and curriculum developers by allowing them to quickly understand the course composition of a program, reducing the risk of misinterpretation and errors during mapping reviews.

The Self-Service Roll-Over feature enables college clients to independently roll over their COMMS data from one academic year or term to another, eliminating the need for COMMS Support Team intervention.

Return more descriptive messaging through the LTI Tool when course outlines are not available.

The Email Template Editor feature allows users to view and edit the email templates used by their organization in COMMS. This gives organizations control over the content of the messages they send.

To enhance compatibility with modern learning systems, the COMMS application will be updated to support LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability) version 1.3, while continuing to support the existing LTI 1.2 integration. This ensures that new clients adopting LTI 1.3 can integrate seamlessly, and current clients using LTI 1.2 will experience no disruption or change to their existing configurations.

Key Outcomes:

• The Outline Management menu will no longer display these items.
• The same content will now be accessible within Academic Year Details → Content.
• Existing permissions will remain unchanged to ensure a seamless transition for users.

This work extends the user authorization data integration by supporting the remaining authorization file types — Program Owner Authorization and Department Delegate Authorization — within the FTPETL job. These were not part of the initial MVP, which included only the minimum files required for migration to COMMS 3.

For more information regarding user authorization data integration, see https://docs.ecoursemap.com/docs/integrations/userauth.

Update COMMS to use standard terms and headings as defined by the Ontario Ministry. See https://www.ontario.ca/page/college-program-standards for more information.

Change Unit Title and Unit Description fields to optional when editing the Course Content outline section. This change re-aligns COMMS 3 with pre-existing behavior in COMMS 2, where the user is not required to enter a Unit Title, nor a Unit Description.