This article will guide you through an overview of Libraries - what they are, the benefits of using them within your institution, and where you can find it on the FeedbackFruits Platform.
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All tools can utilize Libraries, but currently, only the following tools are compatible with Portfolio: Group Member Evaluation, Peer Review, Skill Review, Assignment Review, Self Assessment on Skills, and Self Assessment of Work. This is because Libraries enable the creation of learning activity and learning journey templates.

If you want more information on setting up Libraries, please check out our guides to the different levels of Libraries:

Libraries: Setting up Learning Journeys

Libraries: Learning Design Community

Libraries: Copying an Existing Assignment From Your LMS

Libraries allow teachers and learning designers to manage and organize their learning journeys and rubric and activity templates on a personal, shared, or institutional level.

Within any library, you can easily customize the template name to match the situation — for example, a template within the Shared Library may be named "Semester 1: Politics 101", or a template in the Institutional Library may be named "Peer Evaluation: Faculty of Social Science.”

My library is a place for you to create, edit and manage your templates of activities, rubrics and learning journeys. In here, you'll find three main sections: Activity templates, Rubric templates and Learning Journeys.

Within My Library, only you have access to your templates - these are not shared in the same way as Shared or Institutional Libraries are.

The Shared Library is a collaborative space for templates, where learning designers can cooperate on building courses and rubric templates specific to particular disciplines, departments, or programs within the institution. Members of a shared Library must be invited to join - there is no default access.

As of August 2024 there are some changes to the roles in shared libraries. We've created two roles to access Libraries with - editors and viewers.

The institutional Library functions very similarly to the Shared Library but instead of being focused on a particular set of invited faculty members, it's open to the entire institution as default.

An institutional library will help institutions standardize and organize templates, maintain quality, customize as needed, and share best practices like rich rubrics or balanced activities.

The Institutional and Shared Libraries are collaborative spaces for learning designers to cooperate on building learning activities, rubric templates and learning journeys for an institution at multiple levels - the templates can be targeted at the entire institution, or select faculties, departments, programs, or courses.

An Institutional Library will help institutions standardize and organize templates, maintain quality, customize as needed, and share best practices like rich rubrics or balanced activities.

Additionally, it’s down to the institution how they wish to provide templates to teachers - it would be entirely possible to set a central source of truth for all similar activities/rubrics to stem from to keep cohesion across multiple courses.

Quality curriculum planning is key to enhancing student learning experience and success. Creating a comprehensive course or a detailed activity from scratch can be incredibly time-consuming.

Templates provide a ready-made structure that educators can quickly adapt to their specific needs, saving valuable time that can be redirected to other critical teaching tasks. Furthermore, technology adoption is also easier with templates, as they help lower the barrier for faculty members when starting with a new teaching tool.

With templates, instructors can easily create personalized learning activities that address students’ diverse learning needs while still ensuring all the lesson’s elements are covered. By spending less time on lesson development, instructors can have more time to focus on supporting the students.

To create or access a Shared or Institutional Library, you'll need to contact your partner success manager at FeedbackFruits to enable a feature flag. We recommend that only learning designers at institutions have access to creation of shared libraries, to avoid too many libraries being created. All users have access to My Library by default.

Once the feature flag is switched on you can access the institutional library from the same location as My Library, either from the toolpicker or inside of an FeedbackFruits activity (when implementing a rubric or from the copy from existing dialogue).

When you access app.feedbackfruits.com and log in using your institutional email you’ll be able to access your libraries, templates, analytics and portfolios. The default log in method is with log in link, which will send a link to your email you can authenticate with. Make sure to use your institutional email here.

If you prefer another method, you can log in with password, or university single sign on if applicable – but we recommend using a login link with your institutional email.

Once you access the platform, you’ll see the libraries and insights available to you (read more about libraries and insights here).

If you have more than one FeedbackFruits deployment, you’ll have a dropdown available to toggle between the two – this is especially useful for learning designers or central teams to toggle between test and product deployments.

To access the Toolpicker, click the + button next to your course name (in this example, (Peer) feedback - learning activity examples), and changing the type of activity to add to external tool.

From here, click on the tool you want to import from - this will take you to the Toolpicker for FeedbackFruits.

Your options on the left sidebar are as follows:

You can navigate to whichever library type you wish to access and browse the available activities/rubric/learning journey templates you can import.

While within a compatible activity type (to recap, these are Group Member Evaluation, Peer Review, Skill Review, Assignment Review, Self Assessment on Skills, and Self Assessment of Work), you can add a rubric template from any of the Library options.

Within the activity, navigate to the edit view and scroll down to the Given reviews step - in this example, we’re using a Peer Review assignment so this is step 3.

You’ll see the option to configure feedback criteria.

When you click configure, you’ll be taken to the current criteria sections for the activity. Scroll right to the bottom of this selection screen and you’ll see the option to add from a library.

From here, you can browse either a full rubric or available criterion to add to an existing rubric - in this example, clicking on the use rubrics from Learning Design Community option gives us a few options to choose from:

Clicking on any of these rubrics expands them to show the available criteria:

Using Research Synthesis as an example, you can select this criterion to preview the available rubric. If it feels appropriate for your course, you can click use this rubric in the bottom right to implement it in your activity:

Remember - once you implement the rubric, you can customize it to fit the needs of your particular course. You may really like the setup of the above rubric but wish to add an extra criterion, or change the descriptions of each competency criteria.