Here’s a roundup of new features that have become available in ICON over the last few months. 

Accessible ICON Course Template: This new ICON course template follows accessibility guidelines and is set up to be easy for instructors to manage and students to use. It includes samples of a homepage, modules, assignments, quizzes, and discussions. 

Anthology Ally: This accessibility checker is integrated into all ICON courses. It checks for common accessibility issues. This tool can also help you fix errors and has suggestions for ICON pages and files.

Ally Dashboard: People with Collegiate Administrator access to ICON sites can request access to this dashboard with data of how accessible the pages in that department are. This can be used to identify courses that need extra help and common issues.

ICON Discussion AI Summaries: This feature allows instructors the ability to turn on a general summary of the conversation or to create summaries based on specific topics. The summaries are good to get an idea of topics or questions students have overall, and does not summarize individual student answers. 

ICON Discussions Checkpoints: Instructors now can put multiple due dates on ICON Discussions. This feature is especially useful in discussion assignments where students are graded on responding to a prompt and then replying to other students’ responses. 

Note Depot: This platform, created at the University of Iowa, makes it easier for instructors and students to manage, share and access course notes. Designated notetakers can use Note Taking Exchange to upload notes to Note Depot, and instructors can use Lecture AI to generate notes based on recorded UI Capture lectures.

Tidy Up: This tool makes it easy for instructors to quickly identify and selectively delete little used files in their courses, reducing the need to remediate less accessible files that students don’t actually need.