Beta — available to participating partners. See Oral Assessment & Practice: Beta Feedback and Known Limitations.
What is Oral Practice?
Oral Practice gives students a private, low-stakes space to practice explaining their thinking out loud — for example ahead of an oral exam, viva, or presentation. Students hold a spoken conversation with the Acai voice agent or with a peer, and can retry as often as they like.
Oral Practice is fully formative: there are no grades, no reporting, and recordings stay private to the student. Teachers can see that a practice session took place, but never the recording or transcript itself.
Setting up Oral Practice as a teacher
You set up Oral Practice like any other FeedbackFruits activity in your LMS:
- Add the activity and write your instructions.
- Choose a conversation mode (see below).
- Decide whether to include a submission step.
- Set any deadlines or availability windows.
For peer practice, you define the topics and questions students discuss. For practice with the voice agent, Acai works from a FeedbackFruits-designed set of topics and questions focused on the student’s learning process; this set cannot be customized during the Beta.
Conversation modes in the Beta
- Acai voice agent — the student converses with Acai, which asks questions and follow-up questions about their work and how they approached it. Acai speaks English, and understands English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, German, Italian, and Dutch.
- Peer practice — a live, synchronous conversation between two students, using the topics and questions you configured.
During the Beta, these are the two available conversation modes. Support for additional modes, including group practice, will follow in a later release.
The optional submission step
A submission step is optional, but we strongly recommend including one when students practice with the voice agent. Acai uses the submitted work to personalize its initial and follow-up questions; without a submission, it can only draw on the assignment description and the configured topics.
Privacy: who can see recordings
Recordings and transcripts belong to the student. Teachers can see that a session occurred, but cannot access its content — this is why Oral Practice has no feedback modules. Students can review their own recordings and transcripts, and can download or delete them at any time.
Practical recommendations
- Keep practice sessions under roughly 30 minutes.
- Students can practice on a phone, tablet, or desktop — no special equipment needed.
Student experience
Students open the activity in the LMS, walk through a short onboarding (finding a quiet space, granting camera and microphone access, understanding that the recording stays private), and can prepare private notes before starting. During the conversation, Acai or their peer works through the topics; afterwards, students can review their recording and try again as often as they like.