(09-06-2023) The new release update is scheduled for 2-3 pm CET and contains the following:

New releases

Improvements

Pre-Announcement

In April, we launched Keyword Insights, which summarizes the most frequently used words in student discussions and comments, providing teachers with an overview of what students are saying in their FeedbackFruits activities. By analyzing the language patterns of their students, teachers can make more informed decisions about improving their teaching methods. Despite being only a couple of months old, this feature is becoming increasingly popular. As a result, we have accommodated some requests and refined it.

Some of the previous possibilities that also apply to the new version are:

And these are the new possibilities that have been added:

The next screenshot depicts how the feature looks. The number next to each keyword represents the number of reviews that contained that word. For more information about this release, please check this in-depth article.

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

Availability: Currently, this feature is only available upon request. If you or your institution are interested, please contact your FeedbackFruits Pilot and Partner Success Manager or your main FeedbackFruits contact person.

We are excited to introduce a new way to submit work: recordings! Video assignments have become a widely-used form of assessment in universities worldwide. Now, submitting recorded assignments, such as presentations, debate arguments, or pronunciation tasks for language courses, has never been easier. For students, the recorder is currently available in hand-in tasks where video, audio, or both are enabled.

Furthermore, teachers can also enjoy this feature within Interactive Audio and Interactive Video. This feature will help them create content for their recorded lectures in just a couple clicks, saving up time and stress.

(Fig. 2: The recorder can be found in the new button 'Record'. In this case, it displays the 'Video' option.)

Our new video recorder is integrated into the submission module, so both students and teachers can now record video and audio directly from FeedbackFruits without the need for any additional software or tools. This alleviates users from the multiple additional steps that come between recording themselves and submitting the file.

(Fig. 2: Diverse recording options: audio, video or screen.)

When it comes to recording, there are two options: recording via the camera on your device or recording their screen. Currently, the screen recorder does not yet support capturing audio at the same time. We're expecting to release that feature soon.

(Fig. 3: Recording screen during a presentation.)
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Availability: This feature will be immediately available for everyone after the release. No need for additional request.

As pre-announced in the previous May release, Shared Libraries is becoming live! This feature is a collaborative space for templates, where learning designers can cooperate on building courses and rubric templates specific to the entire institution or to particular disciplines, departments, or programs within the institution. The library's name can be easily customized—for example, "Law School" or "Faculty of Social Science".

(Fig. 4: Joining a library from the All libraries section.)

Segmented shared Libraries will help institutions standardize and organize templates, maintain quality, customize as needed, and share best practices like rich rubrics or balanced activities. They will also allow institutions to segment their populations and create communities of practice.

(Fig. 5: Three different types of libraries integrated within the FeedbackFruits tools –per Faculty, Institution, or Individual.)

To know more on how to use these Shared Libraries, please consult this Help Center article here.

Availability: Currently, this feature is only available upon request. If you or your institution are interested, please contact your FeedbackFruits Pilot and Partner Success Manager or your main FeedbackFruits contact person.

As previously announced, we have improved our Automated Feedback Coach. This coach provides students with real-time formative feedback to help them improve their feedback skills and literacy. Additionally, it can detect any potentially offensive language in the reviews.

Last month, we made the coach available in North America, and we are now pleased to announce that it is also available in Europe!

(Fig. 4: Automated Feedback Coach 2.0 in action.)

With the new coach, users will receive more nuanced and actionable feedback, resulting in significant improvements in feedback accuracy, relevance, and specificity. For more information on how to enable and use the new AI Automated Feedback Coach, please read this article.

To ensure safety, teachers and students can consult their rights in our Transparency note and opt out of the Automated Feedback Coach by clicking the 'Preferences' button. This can be undone at any time.

Availability: The Automated Feedback Coach is currently available in North America and Europe, due to differences in AI & data privacy legislation per region. We aim to expand to other regions in the future. Additionally, this feature is only available upon request. If you or your institution are interested, please contact your FeedbackFruits Pilot and Partner Success Manager or your main FeedbackFruits contact person.

We have added live analytics for Team-Based Learning questions in iRAT and tRAT steps. Specifically, we have added a column per question showing how many answer attempts each student had per question.

(Fig. 5: Number of attempts column in Team Readiness Assessment Test step.)

This is especially useful for running live tRAT in class, allowing the teacher to monitor which groups select which answers, and how far along they are in the review process. Live analytics provide immediate feedback on student progress and performance. Now teachers can track students' engagement and participation, allowing them to intervene or provide additional support when needed.

To use this feature, teachers can simply navigate to Step 2 (iRAT) and Step 3 (tRAT) within a Team-Based Learning activity.

(Fig. 6: Live results of team responses to each answer, from the teacher perspective.)

Availability: This feature will be immediately available for everyone after the release. No need for additional request.

In order to improve the teacher’s experience when reviewing students, a new call-to-action button has been introduced to the 'Give Feedback to Students' step of Skill Review. Depending on the status of the review process, the button says: 'Start Reviewing', 'Continue Reviewing', and 'View Reviews'.

Before, this button was hidden from view until teachers hovered over a student’s name. With the introduction of the 'Start Reviewing' button, teachers now know exactly where to go to begin giving reviews.

(Fig. 7: New 'Review' button. In this image, it corresponds to the 'Continue reviewing' phase.)

How does it work? Clicking this button will take the teachers directly to the first review. If a teacher exits the page without completing a review, they will encounter a 'Continue Reviewing' button upon returning. This button will lead them directly to the first unfinished review while maintaining the current sorting order.

Once the teacher has finished all the reviews, the button will change to 'View Reviews'. This signifies not only that the teacher has completed their 'Give Feedback' task, but also allows them to navigate through each of their provided reviews and make any necessary edits.

Availability: This feature will be immediately available for everyone after the release. No need for additional request.

In past releases, we have been increasing the number of customizable settings available in our tooling. For example, users can increase contrast, share activities, delete, or change languages. To make this experience easier and faster, we have added new icons.

Users can now identify and understand functionality quickly and intuitively, without relying solely on text. Additionally, these icons establish a recognizable visual language that can be easily understood by users from different linguistic backgrounds.

Availability: This feature will be immediately available for everyone after the release. No need for additional request.

When a user opens a FeedbackFruits activity for the first time, a quick onboarding slideshow appears, summarizing the most important workflow steps. However, that slideshow can be skipped or closed with just one click, and its information is not always retained by the users.

To ensure a better understanding of the learning activity, now it is possible to replay the onboarding slideshow as many times as desired. We have added a ‘Show onboarding’ option to the three-dot menu in the app bar.

(Fig. 8: Onboarding slideshow example)

Availability: This feature will be immediately available for everyone after the release. No need for additional request.

As part of our product strategy to enhance pedagogy, learning design, and learning activity management, we are continuously improving our tools. We are excited to announce that we will be releasing new workflow iterations for our feedback tools in the next few months.

Our aim is to provide users with an intuitive and seamless interactive experience, allowing them to focus on providing high-quality feedback, supported by the design of our tools.

We will begin by making changes to the Skill Review and Assignment Review tools, which are used by teachers and instructors to provide feedback to students. Since these tools are significantly less complex than the ones where students provide feedback to each other, we will start with them and then expand to the rest of the Feedback tools.

The new review workflows will have a similar, but improved interface compared to the current one. There will be fewer buttons, resulting in fewer clicks, and the playlist for moving between reviews will be simplified. Our goal is to make the feedback-giving experience as seamless as possible, so both students and teachers can focus on what matters most: learning and growing through feedback.

Availability: The new workflows for Skill Review and Assignment Review are currently unavailable. We will continue to transparently communicate about the development of this feature.