From the beginning, District educators created the innovative Cobb Teaching and Learning System (CTLS) with input from the school community. They designed the online platform with Cobb students, teachers, and families in mind. When CTLS launched as the District’s solution to remote learning in 2020, the CTLS team continued to listen and make user-focused improvements based on community feedback.

Students will soon see more of those feedback-inspired improvements when the CTLS Learn platform undergoes a major facelift in January 2021. The changes include a new student dashboard, an upgraded calendar feature, and the ability for students to access all their live sessions and classroom assignments from a single page.

The redesigned dashboard gives students direct access to announcements, upcoming events, assignments due, available assessments, and live meetings compiled from all their classrooms on one screen.

Thanks to the new CTLS rollout, students will no longer have to navigate to each classroom to access a live digital session. The dashboard will give students quick access to any session that is currently in progress. They will see live classes or sessions and click “Join” to immediately join the live meeting. Clicking the join button will also auto-select the Classroom associated with the live meeting, so the student gains access to all the classroom menus while in the meeting.

Students will see and will be able to easily access a list of the next 10 assignments, which are sorted by the due date. They will also be able to hide specific assignments so that they can move on to the next one once complete. 

When students need to take an assessment, they will be able to see all their available assessments and launch the online testing portal for each directly from CTLS. 

The new student dashboard will also feature a list of the top 20 announcements and 20 upcoming events sorted by date. An event could be an upcoming Assignment (due or available), a posted digital session, or custom events that teachers add to the classroom calendars. Just as they can for assignments, students will have the ability to hide and unhide specific events from their dashboard.

Students will always be able to access the top announcements and events via the new alarm icon at the top of every screen. Upcoming events will be clickable and will change the selected classroom and navigate to the associated resource automatically. 

As requested, students will now have access to digital classroom calendars. Teachers will be able to customize the calendar for their classroom, which will be available to students under their new calendar navigation menu. Calendar events that are generated automatically when a teacher adds an Assignment or schedules a Lesson are clickable by the student, which navigates them directly to the associated resource. 

To better help students connect with the information they need, Classroom level resources will always be visible to students and instructors regardless of whether they are in a digital session or on the classroom resources menu. 

In addition to the top updates to CTLS Learn, the general navigation into classrooms will also include some new features. Students will always be able to access “My Classes” using an icon at the top of their screen. This will allow students to quickly change classrooms without leaving their current screen. Additionally, the student will always see their last active classroom at the top of the screen and in a hover-over on the Classroom menus (Board, Sessions, Resources, Assignments, Discussions). Students will also see other adjustments to navigation labels and be able to navigate to specific sections, like Home, Calendar, My Classes, and Assessments, faster without selecting a specific classroom first. 

The CTLS team sorted through thousands of requests from parents and teachers to help determine which improvements would be included in the January upgrade to the platform. However, they are not going to stop listening. Parents and students are encouraged to submit requests here. Teachers with suggestions for CTLS Learn should use this form.

The next CTLS upgrade will be geared toward teachers with a more student-focused update possibly planned for late Spring 2021.