I’m sorry to hear you feel that way!

We designed the new ICON Dashboard with simplicity in mind, in part because the old interface was confusing for many people — our help desk receives a lot of calls about this, at the beginning of each semester.

We’ll keep looking for ways to simplify, and looking for feedback on things we can improve. This forum has already been the source for many improvements.

You can find the link to the old ICON homepage at the bottom of the dashboard (see: https://icon.uiowa.edu/support/dashboard/#semesters)

Thanks for the suggestion! This forum is mostly about the Dashboard; the course content area is run by software from a commercial vendor, so we don’t have direct control over it. But your suggestion is a good one; we’ll definitely pass it on to the vendor.

In the meantime, If you have specific concerns about the type of files (including file format and permissions) your instructor is uploading to ICON, I suggest you talk with them. They can call the help desk if they need advice or assistance converting to PDF.

There are two types of updates — some fall off when you take a specific action (unread discussion board posts, new quizzes and dropboxes, new content items). Others just show as “recent” (course news items, wiki edits or comments).

We leave the “recent” items up for 2 weeks, basically because we can’t tell whether you’ve seen them or not. We could handle them other ways; e.g., recent course news could be marked as read if you’ve been to the course homepage at all. Would that help? Comments are welcome…

Thanks for the feedback.

The short answer is you’re right; the apparent double-listing is confusing for some people, so we’re working to simplify it.

The longer answer is that we wanted room for more than one link; the Dashboard lets instructors add other types of resources besides the standard ICON site. Currently, instructors can add a wiki on http://wiki.uiowa.edu/ (the Dashboard handles permissions, authentication, and updates) or a link to a generic external course site, which is common for some departments. We hope to add more tools in the future; all of those links are listed underneath the course title.

For students with only standard ICON sites, though, this is not at all obvious. For courses that don’t need space to link to a wiki, or an external site, or some other resource, we should be able to simplify the display. We’re working on it!

Thanks for the suggestion.

I’m not sure we’ll be able to do exactly what you’re asking; instructors can alter the way the course title is displayed, so it might not be reliable for us to take it apart and put it back together in a different order. But we’ll definitely look into it.

I’m sorry to hear you’re having trouble.

We’ve done a lot of performance testing, but I tested again after seeing your comment, both from on- and off-campus networks. I compared the speed of loading the Dashboard vs. the older “my home” screen.

The speed was nearly identical for a student with lots of courses (7) and for a student with fewer courses (2), the Dashboard was about 1/3 faster.

If you’re consistently seeing slower performance on the Dashboard, there may be some problem with your account, or something else we haven’t considered. Feel free to add more detail to the comments here, or contact the helpdesk (384-4357 or icon-support@uiowa.edu) and we’ll try to sort it out.

Thanks for the suggestion; we’re working on an update that I think you’ll find pleasing.

You’re right; some courses, especially in Dentistry and GIS, run well into Spring even though they technically belong to the Fall semester.

We’re looking at ways to detect these based on the course start and end dates, which can be separate from the semester start and end.

The Dashboard should always show you the courses you are working in right now, regardless of which semester they belong to. We’re maybe 95% there, but still working on improvements!

You’re right, it would be great to log in and see something like “2 newly posted grades” next to one of your courses.

We’ll take a look at how to do this. I’m sure it’s possible, but I have to warn you, it may take a little while.