Introduction

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.

 

Where Can I Find Information on Libraries In Practice?

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

How To: Set Up Feedback Criteria (Rubrics, Scales, and Comment-Only)

 

 

What are Libraries?

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.”

 

What is My Library?

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.

 

What is the Shared Library?

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.

• Editor – there are currently two ways a user can be an editor in the shared library:

1. Has the 'learning designer' feature flag on – if a user has this feature flag on, they automatically have access to institutional and all shared libraries - this means they can create new libraries, view all existing ones and join any shared library.

2. Has been made an editor in a shared library - If a shared library has been created, and a user who is the editor of that library is inviting someone to that library they can now make them an editor without the user who they are inviting requiring the 'learning designer' feature flag. Within that respective library the user will be able to edit, create, and collaborate on the templates and rubrics with other editors, but they will not be able to see other shared libraries nor the institutional library.

• Viewer: Has been invited with their email, used in their FeedbackFruits account, to the library by an editor. (note: for a person to be invited they need to have used FeedbackFruits, so we can identify them in our database and enrol them in the shared template course).

What is the Institutional Library?

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.

 

 

 

Benefits of Using Libraries

Collaborative & Cohesive Resources

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.

 

Time Saving for Faculty Members

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.

 

Support Holistic Teaching

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.

 

 

How to: Access Libraries

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).

 

You can access Libraries in three ways:

• From app.feedbackfruits.com

• From the Toolpicker

• Adding a rubric from a Library while within a compatible activity

From app.feedbackfruits.com

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.

 

 

From the Toolpicker

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:

• Homepage

• Libraries

• Past Activities

• Start from Scratch

• Learning Design Community

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

 

Within an Activity

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.

 

Duplicating and Moving Rubrics Within Libraries

 

Within libraries, you can also duplicate and move rubrics. By using the three-dot-menu, you can duplicate the rubric or the entire competency group (set of rubrics), give it a name and select which library you would like to save it in.

 

 

 

Duplicating and Moving Templates Within Libraries

You can duplicate both learning activity templates and learning journey templates in libraries. This allows you to easily copy over activity templates or learning journeys to different libraries you are part of, or maybe use the same template as a springboard for a new idea.

 

 

You can find the option to duplicate using the three-dot menu of the template from within the libraries.

 

 

Saving a Template from a Created Activity

When you save a template from an activity that you’ve created in the LMS, you can choose which library you’d like to save it in. You’ll see all the libraries that you have access to in the list.