In this article, we’ll guide you through the process of setting up an assignment with Automated Feedback as a standalone tool in your course. If you would like to combine it with other assignment review tools, please refer to the articles about setting up Automated Feedback in Peer Review or Assignment Review.

Before you are able to start working with Automated Feedback, make sure that the module has been added to your LMS environment. Navigate to these articles for specific help with that.

Automated Feedback is a supporting module for students. As a teacher you will be able to see which of the pre-defined criteria your students passed. Nevertheless, it cannot be used to grade students. Setting up Automated Feedback will save you time, and will provide your students with additional formative feedback moments that can help improve the quality of their work.

First, write your assignment title. Then, you can either create a brand new assignment or click use copy of existing to select a previous Automated Feedback assignment. A copy of this existing assignment will include all teacher contributions (instructions, deadlines, criteria) of that assignment. Student contributions are not copied. After the copy is made, you can still adjust all settings.

Fill in your overall instructions for the assignment. Please note that you will not be able to publish/save the assignment if you leave this field blank.

The assignment can be an individual- or a group assignment. Click change to choose between one of the following two options.
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Required Submissions
Here you can set the number of files that students are required to hand in. The submission requirement can be set at exactly, minimum or between your chosen amount.
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Setting the required submissions greater than 1 could encourage your students to upload multiple versions of their work to see how they improve.

Scheduling deadlines
Here, you can choose to set a deadline for your students to use Automated Feedback. If you decide to choose this, we would advise setting this a few days prior to the actual assignment deadline to give students enough time to process any feedback received.

You can also decide to leave it blank. In this way, no deadline will be displayed and students can continuously upload their work to receive additional feedback that helps improve their writing.
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​File requirements

You can determine the number of files each student has to hand in, and the type of file. Automated Feedback only supports written documents at this moment, so select the documents box to ensure students don't hand in other files. You can also choose to allow late hand-in if preferred.

Our Automated Feedback tool supports different types of files. In particular, all of those that can be converted to PDF format. Here you have a list of all the supported filetypes:

Guiding students (optional)
If you have specific hand-in instructions for your students (such as the desired font, line spacing, naming the file, etc.) fill them in here.

Once your assignment details are set up, you can start configuring Automated Feedback. If you have any questions regarding our ethics & privacy policies, please make sure to read through these before getting started. Once you’re ready to start setting up your preferred criteria, please navigate to get started.

From here there are two ways to proceed:
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1) First, you could click on start building to start from scratch. The feedback criteria offered will pop up on the right. You can now start selecting different criteria that you would like the work of your students to be checked upon.

Any criterion that contains an arrow requires extra configuration steps. Any others will be automatically inserted once selected.

2) Second, you could also click configure from template to help you get started. Within this overview, you can choose to start from scratch by clicking on new configuration or choose to start by using a FeedbackFruits template. Choosing from a template we offer (e.g. thesis) provides a proposal of criteria we recommend for this type of writing assignment. You are free to change or add any criteria to ensure it matches your needs. Finally, you can also select the criteria set-up of a previous assignment below copy from recent. This allows you to re-use the criteria for an assignment that you have previously created with Automated Feedback.
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For a more detailed explanation of each criteria to help you decide what is most suited for your assignment, please go to this article.
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After you have selected your criteria, please try them out first to make sure you are on board with the feedback we provide. You can do this after you have saved your current set-up. You can always add or delete any of the criteria, even after you have saved the assignment. More information about trying out the criteria and understanding the tool after you've set up your assignment can be read in this article.

Hopefully, this article has helped you to better understand what Automated Feedback has to offer. If you have any questions, do not hesitate to contact our support team.  

We welcome any suggestions you may have to help us improve the Automated Feedback tool. Whether it is a suggestion for a new criterion or feedback on the UI and UX, we are here to hear it!