This article will guide you through our Discussion on Work tool and its possibilities. The article is written to help you to set up your own Discussion on Work.
After you have created a new Discussion on Work assignment in your LMS or on the platform, you see the following screen.
Getting started
If you want to create a new assignment, start with filling out the title. Depending on your LMS, the title you set when creating the assignment in your LMS is already copied here. You can read more here on changing the name of the assignment in your LMS or in FeedbackFruits.
Furthermore, you will see two options in the top right corner. When you click help with setting up, you will find a link to our help center, a link to our support chat and an instructional video about Discussion on Work. The option use copy of existing offers you the possibility to copy another, previous assignment with its instructions and settings. This could save you some time when setting up your assignment.
Instructions
You can start with writing your instructions for the assignment. Note that you will not be able to publish/save the assignment if you leave this field blank.
The assignment can be an individual- or a group assignment. Click change to choose between one of the following three options:
Hand in work individually, discuss individually.
Use this option if you want your students to individually hand in their assignment and then be linked to discuss the work of one or more random peers who have also handed in work for this assignment.Hand in work individually, discuss within groups.
Use this option if you want your students to individually hand in their assignment and get assigned to discuss about the work of one or more peers within their own group, for example within their own class. Students will still be able to see the work of everyone in the course under the "open discussion" step (see below).Hand in work as group, discuss work from other groups individually.
Use this option if the assignment that needs to be handed in, is made by a group of students. Let's say you want your students to work in groups of 4 on the assignment. They hand it in as group and then the individual students randomly get work distributed from other groups to discuss about. In this scenario, if every student is required to discuss the work of one group, the work of each group will be looked at by 4 students from other groups.
If you are choosing for the second or third option, you have to select the groups from your LMS or if this not possible (for example when using our platform) create groups manually
Hand in
In the next step, it is possible to set the hand in details. You can add extra instructions if desired, set a deadline and determine how many files each student has to submit. Students can upload all media types to the Discussion on Work.
Scheduling deadlines
Set the hand-in deadline. Students have to upload their work before this deadline. When this deadline has passed, students will be assigned work of a peer or group to discuss.
Allow students who didn't hand in, to participate in discussion
By enabling this setting, students that did not hand in will be able to participate in the discussion of this assignment and the uploads by other students. This setting become available after setting a deadline at step 2.
Plagiarism check (beta feature)
In response to plagiarism in student work, we have introduced industry-standard plagiarism checking, powered by Turnitin. This functionality is in beta and requires configuration from an LMS admin and FeedbackFruits. If you are interested, please inform your contact person or Pilot and Partner Manager at FeedbackFruits to guide you through the integration. Read more about FeedbackFruits and Turnitin here.
After activating this setting, student submissions will go under an automatic plagiarism check carried by Turnitin, not by FeedbackFruits. Note that students will have to accept Turnitin's Terms of Use the first time they use this functionality.
Guiding students (optional)
If you have specific hand-in instructions for your students (such as the desired font, line spacing, naming the file, etc.) fill them in here.
Discuss with your peers
In step 3 students start to discuss with their peers. Just like in step 2, you can add extra instructions and set a deadline for the discussion. Here you can also decide how many discussions students need to participate in before moving on to the open discussion. If this number is set to 2, students will get assigned the work of 2 peers/groups to discuss.
It is also possible to set the required discussion to all, if this setting is chosen, students will be asked to discuss all the uploaded work. If this setting is chosen, we recommend removing step 4: open discussion. This is because students are already discussing all the work, meaning there is no open discussion left.
Participants grade their assigned peers' handed in work
By enabling peer rating, the students are requested to grade the work of their peers using a scale from 1 to 10. The ratings is visible to the teacher on each submission and on the analytics, and for the student that received it.
Open discussion
In the next step (step 4) students will be able to view and comment on the work of everyone in the course - so also on the work of peers/groups that were not assigned to them in the previous step. Students will only be able to start with the open discussion after they have participated in the required number of discussions specified under step 3.
In step 4, you will again be able to set a deadline. When you have set a deadline for the previous step (step 3) , you will see this option: "Students can start on this task - before or after deadline of previous step". When this is enabled, students can start to discuss the work of everyone in the course before the deadline of step 3 has passed.
If you don't want students to have an open discussion, you can delete this step by clicking on the cross in the top right corner of the step.
Reflections
Finally, in step 5 the settings for the reflection on the discussion are determined. You can set a deadline, add a required length of written reflection (with a minimum and maximum number of words) and add instructions for writing the reflection.
If you don't want students to write a reflection, you can delete this step by clicking on the cross in the top right corner of the step.
Grading
After finishing setting up the core of the assignment, it is possible to add the configurable grading module. Click here to learn more about how this grading module works.
This concludes the Setting up Discussion on Work tutorial.
If you have any questions or experience a technical issue, please contact our friendly support team by clicking on the blue chat button (Note: support is available 24h every weekday & unavailable on the weekend).
