(06-10-23) The new release update is scheduled for 2-3 pm CET and contains the following:

New releases

Improvements for teachers and LMS admins

Pre-announcement

Our Automated Feedback Coach 2.0 is now available in more regions! With the Coach, when students type their feedback in Peer Review or Group Member Evaluation, they will receive accurate, real-time formative feedback to help them improve their feedback skills and literacy.

For more information on how to enable and use 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.

Why we made this: After years working on feedback tools, we would recurrently come across a shared pain-point in higher-education: how to support and guide students while they are providing feedback to their peers? Teaching students feedback literacy could happen before and after a review task, but it was very difficult to coordinate while the student was working on giving feedback. So, that’s why we built the Automated Feedback Coach!

Availability: The Coach is available for our Peer Review and Group Member Evaluation tools. 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.

In the past release, we announced a new tool redesign for Assignment Review and Skill Review. We are culminating this redesign with a handful of new functionalities:

Reviewer Filter: When more than one teacher reviews the same student, both teachers and students can seamlessly toggle between different reviewers. The filter will be applied as soon as a secondary teacher provides a review, and teachers and students can easily toggle between different reviewers by selecting their name from the dropdown menu.

Consolidated review packet: This new feature streamlines the handling of multiple reviews and provides a comprehensive overview of all ratings and comments from all teachers involved. Students and teachers can access the consolidated packet by switching to 'All Reviewers' on the reviewer filter.

New scale ratings view: Say goodbye averages! From now on, scale ratings will display multiple dots representing ratings from different reviewers, instead of an average.

(Fig. 5: New scale ratings display, showing individual different ratings.) 

Why we made this: These newly added features are designed to make the user experience more seamless, especially for multiple reviewers. They improve collaboration among teachers or teaching assistants, making it easier for both reviewers and students to jump in between reviews.

Availability: This feature will be available to everyone upon release, without the need for additional requests.

Our grading modules in Assignment tools are now clearer and more informative. We have polished our wording and added new tooltips, making it easier for users to understand what each facet accounts for. As well, now we support two decimal weights in grading. This helps teachers be more specific when allocating grading percentages. 

Why we made this: In the past years, we have increased our grading granularity. However, too many different grading facets can be confusing. The new improvements aim to help our users (both students and teachers) clearly understand all about the assignment grades. 

Availability: These improvements will be available to everyone upon release, without the need for additional requests. It applies to Peer Review, Group Member Evaluation, Assignment Review and Skill Review.

At FeedbackFruits, we are always working on improving our product. However, some changes and enhancements may not be immediately visible. These enhancements impact the core of our technology, and are essential for the proper functioning of every element within the interface.

Here we pinpoint some of our newest technical improvements:

Why we made this: All of these improvements focus on providing more consistent stability and better reliability. Thus, enhancing the overall functioning of our tools and ensuring a better user experience.

Availability: All these improvements will be available to everyone upon release, without the need for additional requests. Please note that the CSV group imports only apply to FeedbackFruits standalone platform or Microsoft Teams users.

With the announcement that our Automated Feedback Coach 2.0 is now available in more regions, we are happy to communicate that towards the end of 2023, Automated Feedback Coach 2.0 will replace its first version, Automated Feedback Coach 1.0. We will provide more details about this transition in our next release.

Why are we phasing this out: Since its release in 2019, the usage and possibilities of AI have changed drastically. This is why we developed a more powerful version of the Automated Feedback Coach. The new version is not only faster, more reliable and accurate in responses —it can analyze topic-specific feedback (for instance, based on Peer Review criteria), and it is overall much more useful for students.