FeedbackFruits is an assessment and feedback platform that integrates in Moodle. We’re running a pilot of this software until June 2024, and it’s important to get feedback from staff and students to help us understand the pros and cons for teaching and learning. The software was chosen for pilot as it has some interesting functionality to support feedback dialogue and reflection, which in turn can support feed-forward.
The FeedbackFruits pilot has now been running since January 2023, and there has been an increase in activities created in Moodle this past semester. The range of activities, and the number of times they have been used, can be seen in the chart below.
Data: Peer Review 23, Group Member Evaluation 8, Automated Feedback 1, Assignment Review 4, Skills Review 1, Interactive Document 3, Interactive Audio 1
We expected to see increased use of Peer Review, which gives students the opportunity to review and give feedback on the work of others, but it's interesting to see other tools have been found useful too.
Let us know what you think
Feedback from staff and students is slowly trickling in; 7 responses from staff and 15 from students. If you’ve used FeedbackFruits please give us your feedback to help us with our evaluation.
What have we learned so far?
As we work through any pilot there are lessons to learn along the way.
The automated feedback tool allows students to get feedback on a range of academic writing criteria, such as style, grammar, citing and referencing. To check referencing, the tool allows you to choose Harvard as the base for comparison. At Bath we have our own version of Harvard, and our colleagues in the Library took time to compare the two and identified a range of differences. This allows us to consider whether the tool is suited to any given activity. For example, instead of getting the tool to check if referencing had been completed correctly, it was possible to run a Peer Review activity, where students checked each other’s attempts at referencing, using library guidance for comparison. Both activities aim to provide helpful feedback to students as they start on their academic writing journey, whilst freeing up staff time to concentrate on highlighting misconceptions and guiding students in the right direction.
We've also learned that the Skills Review activity can allow multiple staff to assess the same student at the same time, and the tool will adjust the marks to give an average score. This is being used for student presentations, where the assessors can each record their mark and feedback comments after each presentation is delivered.
We’ve also been learning about some of the technical issues related to having such a tool integrated with Moodle.
- We’ve seen a small number of cases where the syncing of groups between Moodle and FeedbackFruits has required some admin intervention. Luckily, the in-page access to FeedbackFruits support has been very useful and issues have been resolved very quickly.
- One FeedbackFruits activity made use of all the available tasks – a Peer Review activity, with an additional automated feedback task as well as a reflection task. With a cohort of 250+, the file size associated with the activity (with all the submissions, automated feedback reports etc.) resulted in the activity timing out for the tutor. Students were able to continue to work on the activity without issue, but for staff we needed admin support and a change of browser to allow us to view the results. Our advice for large cohorts is to split the activity into two parts; automated feedback, and then peer review.
Join us for a FeedbackFruits workshop
Before the start of semester 2 there will be another online workshop delivered by the FeedbackFruits team, focussing on the popular peer review tool. If you’re interested in seeing what it looks like from the student view, please book your place. Come and ask questions.
Book your place on the next FeedbackFruits workshop
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