The Torus Project

Community and Contributors

Since its launch in 2020, Torus has rapidly attracted a diverse community of users and contributors, from industry and academia.  Arizona State University’s Center for Education Through Exploration and Inspark Teaching Network have become foundational parts of the Torus Community, and exceptional contributions continue to emerge from KTH, Unicon, Wyeworks, Gogo, Substantial and many other individuals and organizations.

Process

As an open source project, decisions and priorities for Torus are driven by the community.  Our annual release cycle reflects the calendar (and need for stability) of the U.S. post-secondary system.  A larger strategy is established and published each year, after input and discussion from the community. This strategy drives our 4 annual releases, which align with the academic calendar:

  • 2 Semester releases, before the Spring and Fall terms, encompass greater changes, and may have a more substantial impact on students and educators. These releases have higher stakes for our users, and so have an extended testing cycle; code is frozen for 3 weeks of testing before release.
  • 2 midterm releases occur during the Spring and Fall terms (normally in March and October). Features are selected for these releases with careful attention to the potential impact on live sections. These releases are considered option, and have a code freeze and two week testing cycle.

Roadmap

a compass pointing north

2023 Strategy

Our strategy emphasizes three key points:

  • Prioritizing features that are essential for the BMGF Chemistry Exemplar project (particularly those that impact broader usability and appeal).
  • Feature parity+ and support from course migration from the OLI Legacy System
  • Targeted new features and capabilities.

Latest Release

v.24 Prepares for Fall 2023 semester with largest-ever update

Key Features

  • Onboarding tools for instructors and students
  • Expanded, informative portal pages
  • Assessment settings and scheduling
  • Authoring collaborative activities
  • Flowchart-based authoring of adaptive activities

Upcoming Release

Release v.25 is scheduled for release in October 2023 (code freeze Sept. 21).

Planned Features

  • improved product management, with ability to archive older products
  • Expanded Assessment Settings
  • Expansion of the Revision History tool to track more aspects of course project development
  • Improved Project Export capabilities
  • Improved support and instructor capabilities, including search capability, role visibility, and the ability to transfer students (with data) between sections
  • Markdown editing support
  • Expanded copy-and-past for rich text into the authoring environment
  • Refined analytics and data access
  • UI improvements, including tooltips in the instructor reporting framework

What’s Ahead

v.26 (December 21st release, code freeze November 30). Planned features include:

  • Certificates
  • Homework system
  • Expanded dashboards
  • Adaptive experiments
  • Authoring UX improvements
  • Performance improvements
  • Multi-dimension evaluation