The goal of the chaining feature is to enable teachers to create assignments with different phases. This makes it possible to have more elaborate assignments with multiple review cycles and/or hand-in cycles, and makes it possible to show changes in performance and results over those cycles.

An example of what is possible:

Because the assignments are chained and all use the same criteria, the teacher does not have to fill in the criteria each time, which saves time and prevents errors. Since we know that they have the exact same criteria, we can show comparisons in the analytics.

This way, the teacher will easily be able to compare the class' overall performance with individual student performance as the same criteria are used in the chain.

With this feature, teachers can easily monitor how student performance improves over the course of several chained assignments.

As soon as a teacher creates a second assignment in a course the chaining menu becomes available at the top of the assignment, at the bottom, and in modules where it might be a relevant choice.

When the teacher chooses to chain, a dialog is opened showing all FBF assignments in this course allowing them to choose any of the assignments they want to chain together.

When the teacher continues to set up the assignment chain they can choose to re-use handed-in work from another assignment earlier in the chain, or to reuse criteria from another assignment outside the chain.

Reusing handed in work means that the students won’t get another submission moment, but FBF will pull the handed in work from that other assignment meaning the students have to do less work, and the teacher knows for sure that the work is the same so can compare analytics from the different review rounds of the same work (for instance self-assessment, peer review and assignment review on the same deliverable).

Reusing criteria saves the teacher a lot of time setting up, and also allows us to show comparison matrices of how different reviews with the same criteria went.

This can show for instance how the quality of a student’s deliverable changed over multiple iterations that we all done with the same criteria.

It could also show, for example, how much the ratings of the teacher in the Assignment Review differed from the student ratings in a Peer Review on the same work using the same criteria.

Setting up an overall grade for the entire chained experience happens within the LMS. This helps keep everything in one place and allows teachers to do more complex calculations.

To keep an overview of what is what and how different assignments relate to each other, a page showing the whole chain and every assignment, step, and deadline in it can be accessed from each assignment in the chain.

At the top of each of the assignments, we’ll show whether it is part of a chain, what the previous one was to help students understand how things relate to each other, and a button to go to the full view. This helps form an idea on the entire learning experience and will make it clearer for them to understand what is going on and therefore learn more from it.

From the overview of assignments a new page can be opened, this helps to navigate to different parts of the chain. However, assignments can only be opened from here if the user has opened them before. This is to make sure that a student indeed had access to it already and there are no conditional release conditions set in the LMS that the student has not met yet. We want to make navigating as easy as possible without interfering with parts of the course setup that are done in the LMS.

Once progress has been made within the assignment, the analytic at the top of the assignment will be updated. Here you will find an overview of all the students added who have been added to the assignment and what their current progress is within it. As with our other tools, there will be an option to download the analytics into an excel file (by using the download) button, which will provide you with the complete overview.