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Using the FeedbackFruits Data API

Bas Hintemann
Updated

What is the Data API?

The FeedbackFruits Data API is a way for your institution to automatically pull its own FeedbackFruits data into your own systems.

Where the analytics you can download inside FeedbackFruits are scoped to a single course or activity, the Data API lets you pull your data across your whole institution at once — all courses, activities, groups, and results together. Instead of exporting data by hand, your institution can set up a connection that keeps a copy of this data in your own databases or reporting tools, always up to date.

What kind of data can you get?

The API returns your data as structured, related tables — much like linked spreadsheets, with one row per item. For example:

  • Courses — a table with one row per course, including details such as its name, dates, and settings.
  • Learning activities — one row per activity, showing which course it belongs to and how it's set up.
  • Groups — how students are organised into groups within each course or activity.
  • Student progress — one row per student per activity, showing how far along they are.
  • Grades, submissions, and feedback — the results students produced and the feedback they received.

Because the tables are linked (a course connects to its activities, an activity to its students, and so on), you can combine them to answer institution-wide questions. This makes the API useful for institutional reporting, learning analytics, dashboards, and keeping your data warehouse in sync with FeedbackFruits.

For exact specification on what data is available in the API, see the API documentation of your region:

Good to know before you start

Setting up the API is a technical task. The API is designed to be connected to other software, so getting it working involves writing a bit of code and handling secure access keys.

If you're a teacher, coordinator, or administrator who wants to use this data - and you have no prior experience with using APIs - the best first step is to involve a technical colleague at your institution — for example your IT department, a developer, or a data/analytics team member.

If you're the technical person doing the setup, the section at the end has everything you need to get started.

How to get access

Using the API requires an API key (a secure password-like credential). To request one, get in touch with your FeedbackFruits contact person.

Technical reference 

The FeedbackFruits Data API enables programmatic institutional data extraction. It provides a structured, relational way to sync FeedbackFruits data with internal data warehouses.

Regional endpoints

Depending on the region in which the institution's data is hosted, use the matching base URL. Navigate to this URL in a browser to view the full documentation on authentication, available endpoints, and data definitions.

Workflow summary

For in-depth technical specs, refer to the documentation hosted on the landing page (the URL of the API). In summary:

  1. Authentication — Send a POST request with the API key to the regional login endpoint to receive an access_token.
  2. Authorization — Use that token in the Authorization header of all data requests as a Bearer token (e.g. Authorization: Bearer <your_token>).
  3. Regional endpoints — Ensure requests match the data residency region (e.g. eu-data-api, us-data-api, etc.).
  4. Filtering with query parameters — To keep payloads manageable and syncs efficient, use query parameters:
    • Time-based: created_after, updated_after, created_before, or updated_before (use UTC format).
    • Pagination: query_limit (to set page size) and offset (to move through pages).
  5. Data schema — Every response includes a columns array. This serves as the "dictionary" for understanding the data types and descriptions of the objects returned in the data array.

 

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