Big Updates Are Coming to CS2N on Monday, August 31, 2026

We’re pushing a bunch of updates to CS2N on Monday morning, August 31, 2026, so we wanted to give everyone a heads up before things start looking a little different.

Most of these changes are things we’ve been wanting to clean up for a while. The goal is pretty simple. Make CS2N easier to use, make it easier to find the things you actually care about, and speed up some of the areas that have gotten slower as the site has grown.

A New Dashboard

The biggest thing you’ll probably notice is the new dashboard.

When you log in, you’ll now get a much better view of the things that are relevant to you, including your courses, your groups, your recent activity, and your badges and certificates.

We know one of the things people ask us all the time is, “Where do I find my certificate?” so we wanted to make that a lot more obvious.

We’ve also cleaned up how you get back into courses and how course navigation works in general.

A New Notifications System

We’ve also added a notifications system so we have a better way to let you know when something important changes on CS2N.

You’ll see a notification icon in the top navigation where we can share things like new features, important updates, and other things you may want to know about while you’re using the site.

The goal is to keep these short and useful, not fill your screen with a bunch of announcements.

Changes to Groups

We’ve also made a bunch of changes to Groups.

You’ll see more useful information in your group listings, like how many members are in the group and how many activities have been added.

We’ve also spent some time cleaning up the group pages, especially on mobile, where some things were getting a little cramped or awkward.

There’s also a fair amount of work happening behind the scenes with group progress. Calculating progress for a large group across a big course is one of the heavier things CS2N has to do, so we’ve been working on making that faster and more efficient.

That part may not look dramatically different, but hopefully it feels better.

Single Sign On with OpenID Connect

We’ve also added support for Single Sign On using OpenID Connect.

This gives schools, districts, universities, and other organizations another way to connect their existing login systems to CS2N, so users can sign in with accounts they already use rather than needing to manage a separate CS2N login.

If your organization is interested in setting this up, we’ve put together some information on what we need from you to get started:

Learn more about Organization SSO

Better Icons and Navigation

You may notice some new icons around the site too.

We’ve been trying to make it more obvious what kind of thing you’re clicking on. Instead of using the same icon everywhere, courses, virtual activities, certificates, and other types of content can now have icons that actually make sense for what they are.

We’ve also reorganized the footer a bit because, over time, we’ve added a lot of important pages and the old layout was starting to get pretty crowded.

Better on Phones and Smaller Screens

We’ve also fixed a bunch of little mobile issues.

Things like spacing, menus, profile information, buttons, and some page layouts should behave a lot better on smaller screens now.

None of these are huge changes by themselves, but there were enough little annoyances that we wanted to go through and clean them up.

A Lot of Work You Won’t See

There are also a bunch of changes going out that you probably won’t notice at all.

We’ve been doing quite a bit of work on performance, database queries, background jobs, and other parts of CS2N that help keep things running smoothly.

As CS2N has grown, some areas that worked fine with smaller numbers of users or smaller classes have gotten more expensive to run. We’ve been going back through those areas and trying to make them a lot more efficient.

So while some of Monday’s changes are visual, a good portion of the work is really about making the site faster and more reliable.

And We’re Not Done

This is definitely not the end of the changes we’re making to CS2N.

We’re continuing to work through the site and clean up areas that have grown over the years, improve the experience for teachers and students, and modernize some of the older parts of the platform.

So if things look a little different when you log in on Monday, August 31, that’s why.

If you have any questions, feedback, or suggestions after the update, email us at support@cs2n.org. We’re always interested in hearing what’s working well, what isn’t, and what would make CS2N better for you.

Hopefully you like the changes!