Introduction
FeedbackFruits has partnered with institutions for years to help make teaching easier to organise. Over the past decade, we’ve learned a lot from our partners: the diverse use cases for our tools, the optimal setups for those use cases, and the persistent challenges in higher education.
We understand that designing a proper rubric is challenging—it requires dedicated time and effort to define and explain student expectations effectively.
Moreover, we recognise that adopting and starting with a tool, despite our efforts to simplify it, may not always be straightforward. That's why we aim to assist, not only by offering insightful articles, ebooks, and use cases but also by integrating these resources directly into the product.
Our goal is to foster a community where instructors and learning designers from around the world can share their best resources, whether it's activities you've created, learning journeys you've used in their courses, or rubrics that scaffold assignments for students.
Therefore, we are delighted to introduce the Learning Design Community.
What Is the Learning Design Community?
The Learning Design Community is a platform where you can discover best practice templates for tried and trusted use cases. Here, you'll find templates for single activities, entire learning journeys, and even rubrics that you can seamlessly implement into your course.
However, we understand that every situation is unique. Therefore, you'll always have the flexibility to edit and customise these templates as much or as little as you like.
Please note that there will be a feature flag for these templates – the partner team will decide whether this feature flag is turned on. The feature flag can be turned on for a single individual or the entire deployment. This ensures that if a few learning designers or the central team want to test the functionality or have it available exclusively to them, that is possible, or they can decide to make it available to all teachers at the institution.
We will also update the visual appearance of the toolpicker – the only functional change is that institutional and shared libraries will be merged onto one page.
Toolpicker Before:
We received feedback that our toolpicker was not the easiest to understand - access to the same elements in the sidebar and on the homepage was confusing to users.
Moreover, it lacked visual appeal - the interface was not particularly inviting to users and provided little context for their selections.
Toolpicker After:
With our update, we’ve clarified the purpose of each section for our users by adding context. We’ve also added colour and brightened up the previously grey space. We’ve also icon tooltips into the sidebar to describe what the icon represents, e.g. hovering over the earth icon will show Learning Design Community.
Learning Design Community in Action
If you have the feature flag switched on, you will now see a fifth category in their toolpicker: Learning Design Community. Within that category, you will find templates for learning activities and learning journeys.
These templates will consist of two types:
Activity templates: Provided by the Partner Team – These templates cover common use cases.
Learning Journey Templates: From our Learning Journey Library on our website (currently, the top 5 performing Learning Journeys will be included).
When you click on the Learning Design Community, you will be taken to a page where you can find all these templates. Unlike the regular flow, when you click on a template, the activity will not open directly; instead, you will access a preview. In this preview, you will see all the steps of the activity, along with a description of its contents.
From this dialogue, you can either go back to the main Learning Design Community page or decide to implement the activity.
Additionally, we offer rubric templates within the activity. You can access these in the Feedback tools (Peer Review, Group Member Evaluation, Assignment Review, Skill Review, Self Assessment). These rubrics have been developed in-house collaboratively with instructors and learning designers from our partner institutions.
If you decide to use the rubrics, you will be taken to a dialogue where you can preview, implement, and edit the rubric.
In the near future, we will add the option to add a template from a public link. There are a few use cases for this:
We can share templates via QR code at conferences/webinars - once the QR code is scanned, you will be directed to add your email so the template can be added to your library.
Our partner team can send a public link to institutions or teachers who have not turned on the global library, or are unsure what the best template selection would be, and would like to try a template from the library.
Once you’ve added your email into the confirmation page generated by clicking the link, we'll add that template to your toolpicker and library.
The next time you enter your LMS, you will see this rubric highlighted and ready to use.
Good to Know
Will FeedbackFruits Library be available to all users?
FeedbackFruits Library will be an opt-in functionality for all our pedagogy solution partners, strategic outcome solution and teaching and learning system. It will not be part of all tool packages**. Please check with your learning administrator if you need clarification on your package type.**
Will all regions have access to the same global library?
At the moment we will have a global library for each region - we will make sure to have the same content across all libraries.
Can users save these templates into their own libraries?
Yes. There are two ways to do this:
With the usual flow of creating a template from inside your LMS, if users implement the template, they can then save it as a template to their library.
From a shared library/institutional library, users can do the same by opening an activity of the same type as the template they want to copy and choosing copy from existing. When they save the template, it will automatically be added to the library they are accessing the template from.