On Sept. 12, students across Knox College received a reminder via email from Chief Information Officer James Stevens stating that Knox would soon be fully transitioning to a new My.Knox website. This website would replace the previous one and also introduce new resources for the academic year.
Students were then sent another email on Sept. 19 from the Office of Communications stating that the new public Knox website would be launched soon after, on Sept. 29. Students were encouraged through said email to participate in a chance to test the Knox site before it officially launched. A website refresh FAQ attached to the email included the following statement:
“The current Knox website launched more than a decade ago. While it has served the College well, much has changed in website design and functionality since 2014, and our College branding no longer matches the design of the current site.”
Vice President of Communications Megan Scott stated that the previous design of the Knox website was outdated and hard to navigate.
“We started with user experience research and an assessment of the current site’s speed and technical specifications. The research showed us that while our previous site has held up well over the 10 years since its launch, users found the design and navigation to be outdated, and data showed that we needed to improve areas like site load times and other specifications,” Scott said.
The Office of Communications began working on the main Knox College website 18 months ago, alongside multiple departments and staff, and partnering with the school’s external marketing collaborators, Truth & Consequences. In January of 2025, the work on the redesign of the new site began, with both the Office of Communications and Information Technology Services overseeing the whole project.
“The project’s goals were to reflect the College’s current branding and messaging, create a more modern, user-friendly, and engaging website, provide a better user experience for our internal and external website visitors, and create more user-friendly and secure internal web resources,” Scott said.
The project overall took 10 months to be completed. In addition, due to the data collected by the school, the launch of the new student information system for this academic year also allowed the new Knox website to launch.
“The launch of the new student information system at the start of the new academic year gave us the opportunity to work with Information Technology Services to implement an intranet, where resources, forms, and other helpful information for our internal community would be more easily accessible and better protected from phishing scams and other security threats,” Scott said.
Due to the possibility of bugs and difficulties with the new website, the previous email that said students could test the Knox website helped the communications department manage comments on what issues to fix.
“Communications received more than 200 comments from our community that have been or are currently being addressed,” Scott said.
According to Stevens, the new website is far more reliable as it does not require visiting separate applications.
“The new My.Knox portal is a true intranet application as opposed to the previous version, which was a link farm to various services available to students, faculty, and staff. This allows institutional data and services to be available directly in the portal rather than having to visit all the different applications separately,” Stevens said.
Concerning other new resources/systems hitting Knox, Stevens further stated that there is currently only one remaining system change: replacing the current ID system.
“Our systems are continuously evaluated on the basis of the benefits they provide to students, faculty, and staff, security posture, and redundancy with other systems. We do have plans to replace the current ID card system, as it will no longer be supported by the vendor in 2027, but that work will be done this coming summer of 2026, and is the only remaining system change currently planned,” Steven stated.
As for other up-to-date resources introduced this year, one example is the new classroom resource called Brightspace.
Brightspace, as part of the College’s digital transformation plan, will slowly begin to replace Moodle in many classrooms as the Moodle system will no longer be available to Knox students starting Dec. 31. Currently, according to Scott, about 45% of faculty are using Brightspace this Fall Term, and it is only projected to grow higher in the following Winter Term.
Director of Seymour Library and chair of the Learning Management System Implementation Team Anne Thomason further explained how the change from previously used learning systems to Brightspace came to be.
“The Faculty Experience Committee, through a year-long process, found that by moving to Brightspace, there would be an improvement in student experience and student success, as the course content and information would be in one system,” Thomason said. “It would also give new insights into how students are doing academically and earlier identification of struggling students.”
Over the summer, faculty were informed of Brightspace’s soft launch in the Fall 2025 term and encouraged to get familiar with the system. Faculty were also offered training on Sept. 3 to help further along the transition to Brightspace. However, some staff (a cohort of 17 members) had already attended intensive online training on the new system.
“There were multiple opportunities in August and September for faculty to attend ‘Introduction to Brightspace’ workshops and ‘Assessing Student Learning’ workshops, as well as individual appointments with our Digital Scholarship Coordinator, Chris Patterson,” Thomason said. “Training began with faculty to prepare for Fall Term, and we are now working on training with students and are planning on getting feedback from students currently using Brightspace to see where we need to improve features and our faculty training.”
