(11-04-2023) The new release update is scheduled for Friday, April 14th, between 2-3 pm CET and contains the following:

New releases

Improvements

Bug fixes

Keyword Insights in Peer Review & Group Member Evaluation

Student engagement in Peer Review & Group Member Evaluation tools generates a lot of discussions, but the volume of text can make the common topics of discussion hard to discern. You probably don’t have time and energy to view every comment, but you want to get an overview of what students are saying in these discussions. With Keyword Insights, you can now get a short summary of the most used words in the discussion and see the comments in which these words appear.

Keyword Insights will be available to all users following this release, but it will only appear after a certain threshold of activity has been crossed, ensuring you don’t see these insights in small cohorts or before a lively discussion has taken place. The conditions are as follows:

Only keywords that appeared in more than 5 reviews are shown. The number next to each keyword represents the number of reviews that contained that word. Keywords mentioned in comments do not appear. For more information about this feature, please check this in-depth article.

(Fig. 1: Keyword Insights viewed from within the Peer Review tool)

(Fig. 2: The selected keyword filter will also filter the relevant comments)

Improved LTI 1.3 integration in Canvas

To ensure ease of use, and faster learning activity creation with fewer clicks, we have improved our LTI 1.3 integration with Canvas. Up until now, users had to navigate to ‘External Tool’ and select ‘FeedbackFruits’ from a list in a small pop-up screen. FeedbackFruits would then launch, but the frame was often way too small. After finishing the setup of the activity and clicking ‘Save’ within FeedbackFruits, users could be confused about having to click ‘Select’ in the External Tool pop-up screen from Canvas. Please see a short clip of the old flow in the next figure.

(Fig. 3: old Canvas activity creation flow)

Therefore, to improve the user experience, FeedbackFruits can now be selected straight from a dropdown menu for both assignments and modules, removing the ‘External Tool’ steps completely. See the new flow in the figure below.

(Fig. 4: new Canvas activity creation flow in Assignments, through the three dots menu).

The old flow is also still available, but when using assignments, the ‘Select’ step is automatically skipped. Important to note that this change won't be available for all existing customers automatically, as it depends on the institution FeedbackFruits integration:

If you are interested in having this feature, please first inform your institution's Center for Teaching and Learning or LMS administrator. Then, if you have rights to set this up, contact your FeedbackFruits Pilot/Partner Success Manager.

Hosting in Canada

Starting with this release, FeedbackFruits will have servers in Canada, in addition to our existing servers in Europe, the United States and Australia.

It is important to note that not all FeedbackFruits data from Canadian institutions will automatically be transferred to Canadian servers. If you wish to switch servers, the integration setup must be modified. If you or your institution are interested in doing so, please contact your FeedbackFruits Pilot and Partner Success Manager or your main FeedbackFruits contact person.

Rephrasing learning steps descriptions

This update makes FeedbackFruits' tools more user-friendly by improving the descriptions of the learning steps. Clearer wording makes the different components of learning activities easier to understand, helping teachers and students navigate through activities with less confusion - especially new users.

Potentially unfair allocations distribution

Our allocations algorithm is designed to distribute allocations in a fair way –every participant gets allocated the same number of people or groups, and every person or group is allocated the same number of times. Therefore, they receive the same amount of allocations. This procedure assumes that every participant completes the task, otherwise, the differences are inevitable.

In some cases, reports have shown that the distribution of received allocations was unfair, particularly when reviewing multiple students outside of one's own group. Although the number of given allocations was always fair, it was possible for one student to receive 2 reviews while another received 4 in an assignment with 3 required reviews.

Further investigation revealed that this was not a coincidence but a bug in the algorithm's inputs. The bug has since been fixed. Two other bugs were also discovered and fixed during this investigation. The first was in Discussion on Topic/Work and Peer Review, where individual hand-ins were required but in groups of 2+ submissions/topics. In this case, a student who had submitted once could already be allocated to other students. The second bug was found in Discussion on Topic/Work, where individual hand-ins were required within groups and students who didn't hand in were allowed to participate in discussing. Without having handed in, a student would never be allocated a peer to discuss with.