- Blog Categories
- All Posts (16)
Kicking off the 2025-26 school year (and this blog!)
Welcome to the Modern States blog! As the 2025-26 school year ramps up, we’re excited to launch this space, where we’ll share updates, stories, and musings about our work, our learners, and the broader effort to keep college affordable and accessible for all.
We’ve been hard at work improving the Modern States experience for all the learners and educators who use our courses. Below is a recap of recent updates that we’re excited to share:
Course Improvements
We’re actively making enhancements to our courses, which are at the center of the learning experience. In our course catalog, you’ll notice that some courses are now labeled “Legacy” and others “2025 Edition.” The legacy courses are the versions that have been available, while the 2025 editions are refreshed with the following changes:
Streamlined navigation: We’re transitioning to a new experience that emphasizes content and moves other platform elements to the background. When you launch course content, everything other than the content will disappear from your browser window, leaving you to focus on what matters.
New content: We’re including new elements across our courses, including written introductions and summaries of key concepts embedded throughout each course. To develop these elements quickly and comprehensively, we’re using a set of new AI features in tandem with college faculty to ensure learners are getting a top-tier experience.
Enhanced assessment: We’re consolidating quizzes so that there are fewer in each course, but they address broader sections of course content. To ensure that you’re getting progress checks along the way, we added a Knowledge Check after each lecture.
We also added one of our most requested features: feedback about the correct answer on quiz questions that learners get wrong! This helps you understand the correct answer to reinforce your learning, not leave you hanging.
Integrated help desk on every page: It’s now easier to find the answers you need about Modern States, our courses, and the Brightspace learning platform. The green question mark in the bottom right of all course content pages connects directly to our FAQ articles, and offers an easy way to provide feedback without leaving your learning experience. If you experience any issues with the new content, or if you have ideas about how to make Modern States even better, we encourage you to let us know.
Over the next several weeks, a “2025 Edition” will be landing for all of our courses alongside the “Legacy” editions. We recommend that all learners who are starting a new course use the 2025 edition, but if you’re already taking a course, don’t worry: you have until the end of 2025 to complete any legacy courses.
These course updates are just the beginning. We intend to continue integrating enhancements into our courses on a regular basis to make them better than ever. Stay tuned for more!
