(01-09-23) The new release update is scheduled for 9-10 am CET and contains the following:

New releases

Improvements for all users

Pre-announcement

A new space within our FeedbackFruits platform is available! For months, our team has been working on the Learning Journeys, multistep course designs targeting different learning outcomes to foster student engagement, skills and success.

Within our FeedbackFruits Platform, Learning Designers and teachers will now find a space to create connected learning experiences: the Learning Journeys. Users will be able to easily set up multiple FeedbackFruits activities at once, and implement these into their LMS courses as single activities with only one click.

With the Learning Journeys, we aim to help institutions seamlessly create rich course designs, extracting the full potential of the tool suite, and providing more meaningful learning experiences for students. Besides, one of the goals of our Platform ensuring the best pedagogies can be easily scaled, shared and reused. Thus, the new Learning Journeys complement the Rubrics and Templates that can be shared and managed via the Libraries space.

In future releases, we aim to incorporate the possibility of a ‘placeholder’ block in a Learning Journey, so that it can represent ‘non-FeedbackFruits’ activities that also happen throughout a students’ journey. This way, the journeys can better represent the flow of the entire course design, accommodating a wider diversity of learning experiences.

Looking for more inspiration? Please check our Learning Journey templates here.

Availability: Currently, this feature is only available upon request within our FeedbackFruits Platform. If you or your institution are interested in FeedbackFruits Platform, including Shared Libraries and Rubrics, please contact your FeedbackFruits Pilot and Partner Success Manager or your main FeedbackFruits contact person.

We are excited to announce that FeedbackFruits now integrates with Turnitin, the well-known plagiarism checker. We have joined forces to ensure honest, original, plagiarism-free submissions within the FeedbackFruits tool suite. FeedbackFruits integrates with Turnitin for all tools that allow for submissions (Peer Review, Assignment Review, Self-Assessment of Work, Discussion of Work, Automated Feedback).

Adding plagiarism functionality has been highly requested by our users, as academic integrity is crucial for universities. Previously, students had to submit their work to Turnitin before submitting it to FeedbackFruits. Teachers then had to check Turnitin and FeedbackFruits separately, resulting in additional steps, clicks, and time.

How does it work? Now, teachers can simply turn on the plagiarism checker in the ‘Edit’ mode. Then, students will submit their assignments, following the usual FeedbackFruits flow. Teachers can access the full Turnitin plagiarism report by just clicking on the submission, and then ‘View report’. It’s important to note that before a student’s first submission, they will have to consent the to data processing agreement of Turnitin.

(Fig. 4: Turnitin turned on in the Edit mode from the teacher's perspective.) 

Availability: To use this feature, your institution must have a Turnitin license or partnership. For now, 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.

Our Skill Review and Assignment Review tools have a new and fresh look! We have been working on an enhanced navigation and user experience throughout our Assignment tools. However, this redesign isn't just a change in appearance – it's a proactive step towards improving usability, efficiency, and engagement across our platform.

For now, we have implemented the new changes on Skill Review and Assignment Review. In the near future, we aim to release the new designs for Peer Review and Group Member Evaluation. Please read more about it at the end of these Release Notes. 

The key highlights of the tools redesign are:

We understand getting familiar with the new interface may require more details. For that reason, you can read more information about the redesign, what to expect, and comparisons between the old and the new flow in these articles here:

If you have any further questions about the new designs and navigation, please do not hesitate to reach out to our Support chat or connect with your FeedbackFruits contact person.

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

This Spring, we released our Automated Feedback Coach, which provides real-time, AI-powered feedback to students on their review comments. The coach gives specific, actionable, and personalized suggestions for improvement tailored to the students’ language use and content of the review.

Since our Automated Feedback Coach launch in Group Member Evaluation, it has received lots of interest from partners and users inquiring its availability in other tools. For that reason, we have implemented it to our Peer Review tool, providing real-time content-specific feedback to students as they review their peer’s work.

(Fig. 10: Automated Feedback Coach providing input to students' review comments in Peer Review.)

For more information about how to enable and use the Automated Feedback Coach, please read more here. At FeedbackFruits, we strongly support human agency when using AI for work or education. It is one of our core principles when developing AI features. Thus, if teachers enables our Automated Feedback Coach, students can consult their rights in our Transparency note and opt out of the Automated Feedback Coach by pressing the ‘Preferences’ button. This can be undone anytime.

Availability: The Automated Feedback Coach is currently available in North America and Europe due to AI legislation per region, but we aim to make it available for CA and APAC with local data processing soon. 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.

Following the announcement of Automated Feedback Coach available for the Peer Review tool, we are happy to share that our Coach now speaks Dutch and French too!

Since the release of the Coach, we have received very positive feedback and requests to support more languages. For now, the Automated Feedback Coach will provide real time, tailored feedback in Dutch and French. In the future, we aim to support other languages, just as our entire tool suite.

To change the language of the Coach, students can do so by pressing on the tool tip, and then 'Open preferences' or by navigating to the Preferences button in the top right corner of their screen (three dots button).

For more information about how to enable and use the Automated Feedback Coach, please read more here.

Availability: The Automated Feedback Coach is currently available in North America and Europe due to AI legislation per region, but we aim to make it available for CA and APAC with local data processing soon. 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.

Our Keyword Insights feature is now available for Interactive Study Materials. This feature 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.

(Fig. 16: Keywords insights within Interactive Video, showing the most popular words within all the student comments.)

These are some of the highlights of the Keywords insights feature:

For more information about the Insights feature, please read more here.

Availability: This feature will be immediately available for everyone after the release. No need for additional request. After this release, all new activities created will have insights available automatically. However, existing activities will not undergo automatic backfilling in the database due to the large size of data, except under special circumstances, to prevent performance issues.

Tool suite design refinement

As part of our summer revamp, we have been working as well on polishing the look and feel of our entire tool suite. These changes do not affect the way our tools and features work. Instead, they improve the overall user experience, providing a cleaner and more refined user interface. These are the key highlights of the refinement:

(Fig. 18: Refined user interface including improved Notes feature, streamlined top bar, and Instructions module with formatting option.)

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

New Peer Review and Group Member Evaluation Workflows

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 are releasing new workflow iterations for our feedback tools.

For now, we have already released the changes for Skill Review and Assignment Review, and the next tools to follow with be Peer Review and Group Member Evaluation.

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. 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.

Curious to hear more? Please reach out to your FeedbackFruits Pilot and Partner Success Manager or your main FeedbackFruits contact person.

Availability: The new workflows for Skill Review and Assignment Review are currently available for all newly created assignments. For Peer Review and Group Member Evaluation, we will continue to transparently communicate about the development of this feature.