Introducing the Acai Grading Assistant

We know how valuable your time is, especially when you're focused on nurturing the growth of your learners. That's why we're excited to introduce the Acai Grading Assistant, a brand-new feature designed to make providing insightful feedback on student work faster and more efficient within your Assignment Review and ISM activities.

Think of Acai as your helpful AI co-pilot for grading. It intelligently reads student submissions and offers a suggested rating based on pre-defined, high-quality criteria. This is just one piece of our growing suite of AI-powered tools aimed at simplifying and enhancing your teaching workflow, so you can focus on what matters most – guiding your students' learning journey.

Acai Grading Assistant is currently feature flagged - please ask your Pilot/Partner Manager at FeedbackFruits to turn it on for you if you'd like to try it out. 

How the Acai Grading Assistant Works: A Quick Overview

The Acai Grading Assistant seamlessly integrates into your existing Assignment Review and ISM setups. Here's a peek at the magic behind the scenes:

1. Activation is Simple: Within your Assignment Review or ISM activity settings, you'll just need to enable the "Feedback Coach" with a quick toggle.
2. Leveraging Smart Criteria: To let Acai do its thing, you'll select at least one "Acai Assisted Criteria" when setting up your rubric. These are specially designed criteria that Acai understands and can evaluate effectively.
Important Note: Currently, Acai works specifically with these pre-defined "Acai Assisted" criteria. We know custom criteria are important, and we're actively working on bringing that functionality to you as soon as possible. Stay tuned for updates!
3. Acai Analyzes: Once a student submits their work, and you navigate to the grading stage, Acai gets to work, analyzing the content against the chosen criteria.
4. Intelligent Suggestions: Acai then provides a suggested rating, along with a clear explanation of why it chose that rating and even some draft feedback you can use.

Getting Started: What You'll Need

To take advantage of the Acai Grading Assistant, here's a quick checklist:

Feature Flags Enabled: Please reach out to your Pilot/Partner Manager at FeedbackFruits to have this switched on for you. 
Assignment Review or ISM Activity: You'll need to be working within either an Assignment Review or an ISM activity.

Specific Setup Steps:

Assignment Review: Enable the "Feedback Coach" toggle within the Review Task settings and include at least one "Acai Assisted Criteria."
ISM Activity: Ensure your ISM activity includes a "Rate students’ discussion contributions step that supports rubric criteria. This is essential for Acai to function. Then, add at least one "Acai Assisted Criteria" to this step.
Identifying Acai Assisted Criteria: When configuring your feedback criteria, you can easily identify the "Acai Assisted" ones by looking for a special "Acai Assisted" chip next to them.

Seeing Acai in Action: Where to Find the Suggestions

Once everything is set up correctly, here's where you'll see Acai's helpful suggestions:

For Assignment Review:

Student Submissions: After a student (or group) has uploaded their document(s), head to the "Give Reviews" step.

Suggested Ratings: You'll see a "Suggested" Acai chip on the rubric criterion option where Acai has proposed a rating.

Important Considerations: Acai currently focuses on the most recent document uploaded by a student or group. Also, it can only analyze text-based documents at this time – audio and video submissions won't trigger Acai feedback just yet.

For ISM Activities:

Task Completion: Acai will start providing suggestions once a student has completed all the requirements for the ISM task (reaching 100% progress).

Discussion Contributions: You'll find Acai's suggestions appearing within the discussion thread contributions.

Key Point: If you're not seeing Acai feedback in an ISM activity, double-check that the student has reached 100% progress on all steps, including those not directly related to discussions.

Understanding Acai's Output: Rating, Explanation, and Feedback

When Acai offers a suggestion, it comes with three helpful components:

Suggested Rating: This is the most visible part – a clear "Suggested" chip next to the rating option Acai recommends.

Explanation: Curious about Acai's reasoning? Just click the info icon within the "Suggested" chip to see a bullet-point list explaining how and why Acai arrived at that particular rating.

Suggested Feedback: When you're using the Feedback Coach, Acai also provides draft feedback that you can easily adopt and edit when writing your review for the student. If you use the suggested feedback as is, we'll automatically include a note indicating that AI assistance was used, ensuring transparency.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does it take for Acai to provide results? Generally, you can expect suggestions to appear within 1-2 minutes. In some cases, especially during peak usage, it might take up to 5 minutes. If it takes longer, there might be an issue, and Acai will usually try again.

How accurate is Acai? Based on our testing, Acai's suggested ratings are typically very close to educator ratings, usually within one level. Acai tends to be slightly more lenient than educators. We're constantly working to refine its accuracy.

What kind of criteria and submissions work best? Acai works best with "Acai Assisted" rubric criteria that have:
* Clear and understandable titles (avoiding jargon or codes).
* Detailed descriptions for each rating level that clearly differentiate them. More descriptive text at each level is generally better.
* Currently, Acai only analyzes text within document uploads. Image or graph-heavy documents won't be effectively processed in this version.

Will Acai work in other Review Task types (like Peer Review)? Not at the moment, though we hope to introduce this functionality across all compatible tools in the future. 

Can I choose not to use Acai? Absolutely! Simply ask your Pilot/Partner Manager at FeedbackFruits to disable it for you. We're also exploring ways to make this more easily manageable by educators directly.
Can I use my own custom criteria with Acai? Not yet, but we're actively developing this functionality and will share updates as soon as it's available. We recognize this is a key feature for many of you.

Which Learning Design Community criteria are compatible with Acai? Here are some criteria sets you can readily use:

• Competency Group: "Feedback on student academic research"
  • Competency: "Information synthesis and evaluation"
  • Competency: "Research Practices"
  • Competency: "Content"
• Competency Group: "Feedback on student writing"
  • Competency: "Content"
  • Competency: "Organization"
  • Competency: "Language"

We're excited for you to experience the Acai Grading Assistant and see how it can streamline your feedback process. As always, we're eager to hear your feedback as you explore this new feature!