Have you ever wanted to skip the last challenge?

It's possible! 

The“Skip” button is now available on all challenges, including the last one. You can find this button near the “Check” or “Next” in the track.

Hi everyone!

We're excited to announce a new feature coming to Instruqt Labs: Progress Indication!

This feature will help to see the progress within a track, and also provide the ability to restart the track when embedded.

We hope this will help learners stay motivated and on track with their journey!

As always, let us know if you have any questions or feedback.

Happy learning!

We've been working to smoothen the experience for learners following a Track Invite link. This will help learners to find and consume your content more effectively. Improvements include a fully branded user journey, tracks appearing in the order selected, and more. 

Here's what's new in detail:

• Branded journey - Learners will now face your brand, as defined in the team banner on your content page, more frequently throughout the flow, resulting in more trust and less confusion.
• Add context - You can now set a public facing title and description for each invite. These changes will help you provide more context and guidance to learners. Note: existing invites without these fields will use a generic fallback.
• Set Track order - Tracks are now presented to learners in the same order as selected during invite creation.
• Cohesive experience - Tracks in the Study Room are now grouped by invite using branded cards with a title and (optional) description. This will make it easier for learners to find and consume your content more effectively.

Want to experience the new Study Room as a learner? Follow this demo invite link.

Action required? No, but recommended:

Although not required, we recommend doing the following so learners can fully benefit from these changes:

• Review your team branding on your Content page to ensure invitees see your correct logo and background image or colour.
• Set a public title and (optional) description for your existing invites.
• Review the track order in your existing invites to ensure they are shown in your desired order to future invitees, if that is important to you.

Got questions? Feel free to reach out via email our Slack.

We planned some changes to the wording on Instruqt based on feedback from our users. The messaging of the track and challenge completion will be updated.

We hope that these changes will help to clear up any confusion and make the user experience more enjoyable. Thanks for your feedback, and keep it coming!

Today marks a milestone for Instruqt with the launch of a brand new team page and navigation. We’ve talked with a lot of different customers, and we feel that these changes will help you find, manage and share your content more effectively.

Here’s what has changed:

• a new team page offering improved displaying and filtering capabilities (this replaces your old team page and Creator Studio)
• a new sidebar navigation optimised for creating and sharing content
• a new look and feel as you might have noticed already :)

Next to that, we’ve also simplified  content sharing to give you more control over who can access your content. As of today, the only way to share your track, is through inviting or embedding. As a result, please keep in mind:

• learners will no longer be able to access your tracks through public urls such as https://play.instruqt.com/TEAMSLUG/TRACKSLUG (please make sure you replace these with an embed or invite)
• learners will no longer be able to access your old team page (please make sure to remove any links pointing to https://play.instruqt.com/TEAMSLUG on your own channels)
• we’ve removed the (confusing) private and published visibility toggles on the track pages and are dropping support in the CLI and yaml files soon. Our documentation is already updated to reflect these changes.

If you have any questions or feedback, please reach out to us. We’d love to hear from you.

The most flexible sandbox around just got a bit more powerful. Today we're announcing native windows support for our sandboxes.

While we have supported running windows hosts as part of our sandboxes for a while, they required a stepping stone to connect to them. As of today that is no longer needed. We have added feature parity for Windows based virtual machines with our Linux-based hosts.

With this release you can now:

• Use PowerShell to write lifecycle scripts
  You can now create PowerShell-based lifecycle scripts that run directly on the Windows VM. This allows you to integrate better with the Windows ecosystem, and allows for easier ways to set up and check sandbox environments.
• Run PowerShell based terminals
  Terminal tabs now also support Windows hosts. Give your users access to an interactive PowerShell session on their Windows VMs.
• Use our built-in file editor
  We've also updated our built-in file editor to supports Windows-based filesystems. The editor gives your users an easy way to view and edit to text-based files, like log or configuration files.

Read more about Windows Support on our docs. Happy creating!

We’re announcing a new way to discover what Instruqt has to offer: the Inspiration Library. Here you can find example tracks, ready-to-use templates, and tutorials that will help and inspire you to get the most out of Instruqt.

• Learn how to use Instruqt with Terraform to build cloud resources or configure SaaS accounts.
• Run a service in the background or keep a long-running command going between challenges with the GNU screen tool
• Learn how to set up a multi-node Kubernetes cluster

Good to know: source files for the templates, examples, and tutorials are available on Github.

Happy creating!

Previously you had to host assets on a separate CDN now you can simply add them to your track directory. 

Get started by adding an assets folder to your track directory:

.
├── assets
│   ├── image.png
│   └── video.mp4
├── config.yml
└── track.yml

And reference assets from markdown:

Hello there, assets! ![Image Description](../assets/image.png)

Or YAML:

notes:
- type: video
  url: ../assets/video.mp4

For more information read the docs.

Learners often feel overwhelmed by the assignment content displayed in the lab environment's sidebar. This has a negative effect on the user's engagement with your tracks.

To solve this, we are shipping the ability to add collapsible sections to your tracks.

The sections can be easily added to your existing content by using the following syntax:

< Name Section >
================

In addition, we updated the markdown styling, to improve the readability of the sidebar content.

Check our documentation for more information on how to implement sections in your tracks.