About the Project:
This project aims to pilot and evaluate innovative assessment technologies to transform assessment design and enhance student learning experiences. A range of modular, flexible assessment tools offered by FeedbackFruits are being trialled. This project is a collaboration between the Faculty of Health and the Teaching and Learning Academy
Empowering Students to Unpack Complex Materials – Comprehension Tool
As a tutor, you probably assign key readings for students to critically analyse. However, some students may struggle to actively engage with and comprehend complex materials.
The Comprehension tool aims to solve this problem by scaffolding the reading process. You can upload a document for students to review. But rather than leaving them to freely annotate, you provide specific topics and themes to guide their analysis. This gives direction to facilitate understanding. Students then annotate passages related to the predefined topics, allowing them to actively process the content. Finally, requiring a short summary based on their annotations enables students to synthesise the key takeaways, further cementing comprehension. The tool equips students with a structured approach to critically consider the materials, overcoming barriers some may face when reviewing readings independently. In this way, the Comprehension tool may support students in building crucial interpretative and analytical skills. It transforms a potentially passive reading activity into an engaging guided discovery process targeting enhanced understanding. In addition, the tool provides you with helpful learning analytics like heatmaps showing frequently annotated areas, supporting opportunities to clarify concepts students struggled with.
We would like your help to see how well this works in practice.
Boost Student Collaboration Through Peer Critique – Peer Review Tool
Peer review demonstrably enhances learning, critical analysis, self-reflection, and a host of other higher order skills essential for student development. Whoever, designing and implementing an effective peer review process can be an arduous process. You must manually facilitate student submissions, peer assignments, criterion setting, and consolidation of feedback. This convoluted workflow often hinders adoption despite the pedagogical value.
The Peer Review tool streamlines this entire process online. You easily create peer review assignments, establish criteria, set deadlines, and define reviewer allocation rules. In addition to this: Automated features assist with many tedious tasks. The criteria and rubrics you specify guide student reviewers to give constructive, standardised feedback. Reviewer anonymity promotes impartiality. AI assistance offers students recommendations to improve their peer critiques. Finally, robust learning analytics empower you to track student progress at each stage and intervene when required.
We would like your help to see how your students respond to peer review.
Embed Interaction to Bring Videos to Life – Interactive Video Tool
As educators in the digital age, we naturally embrace multimedia to enhance our teaching. However, the reality often falls short – students passively watch assigned videos rather than actively engaging. Despite our best intents, videos can sometimes be just another content dump rather than a catalyst for insight.
The Interactive Video tool has the potential to turn video into a dynamic, social experience. Simply upload a clip then embed discussion questions and commentary prompts directly within the timeline. The tool tracks video access, question answers, and discussion posts – data you can use to pinpoint confusing areas.
We would like your help to understand how this affects the student learning experience.
AI-Powered Assistance for Better Feedback – Automated Feedback Tool
Providing meaningful feedback on student writing is imperative, but as classes get larger this becomes more difficult.
The Automated Feedback tool is designed to alleviate some of the burden through targeted AI assistance on repetitive lower-order tasks. Instantly scan drafts to identify issues in grammar, structure, referencing, or other mechanistic criteria you specify, freeing you to focus on higher level content feedback. The automated feedback also yields helpful analytics – easily monitor trends in areas students struggle with most. Use these insights to tailor learning materials and instruction to build competencies across the cohort.
We would like your help to see how well this works in practice.
Project Goals:
Key goals of the project include evaluating the effectiveness of these tools for enhancing the student learning experience, assessing impact on your practices, and gauging the potential for these technologies to enable more innovative assessment designs.
Want to get involved:
If you are interested in piloting these tools in your modules, please contact Chris Gillies or Jim Turner. Support and training will be provided.