Introduction
From January 2023 – June 2025, the Centre for Learning and Teaching (CLT) piloted software called FeedbackFruits, an external platform designed to add a variety of assessment and feedback functionality to Moodle. During this period, both staff and students engaged with a range of activities, surfacing valuable insights into its strengths, limitations, and potential impact.
The pilot has now officially ended and we offer a huge thank you to the staff and students who took the time to try it out and provide valuable feedback. As a result, we’re able to share a brief summary below of what we did and what we discovered. The Faculty of Engineering & Design will continue to learn more about the platform as they have begun their licensed use of it in this academic year. Please get in touch with Yvonne Moore, Digital Education Developments Lead, if you have any questions about this or any other educational technology development.
Why we decided to pilot
One goal of the Technology Enhanced Learning (TEL) team in the CLT is to support staff in the most effective use of the educational technology we have available. Where we discover areas for improvement, we spend time reviewing available options, either within the existing toolset or by looking further afield.
Via discussions during curriculum transformation work and the annual NSS analysis, we identified potential gaps in the toolset in relation to assessment and feedback practice. In approaching FeedbackFruits, our goals were to test functionality for improving the feedback experience for students whilst streamlining the process required to administer assessments, where the focus could be on scaling quality feedback in a timely fashion.
FeedbackFruits was available to all teaching staff at the university, to allow us to gather as much information as we could. However, we appreciate that some staff were reluctant to try out a ‘pilot’ tool due to the legitimate concern that it may only be available for a short time, but nevertheless across the pilot timeframe we had engagement from 67 staff and 3000+ students. From the student perspective we wanted to know if FeedbackFruits could improve their ability to deliver constructive feedback to peers, carry out effective self-assessment, use assessment criteria, and better understand their received feedback. It was important to also check the usability and accessibility of the interface, and the ease of participation in activities. For staff, we wanted to know if it was possible to streamline the online feedback process and reduce the time required to administer an assessment, whilst providing insight into the students’ participation and development using detailed analytics.
How did it go?
A total of 111 activities were trialled across 13 different departments, with 'peer review’ and ‘group member evaluation’ proving the most popular. We received feedback survey responses from 30 staff and 96 students. Some staff also kindly gave time to answer questions about their use cases and to follow up on their survey feedback responses.
In the final year of the pilot 94% of staff (n=17), found FeedbackFruits intuitive and easy to use, 82% felt their FeedbackFruits activities enhanced student learning and 76% felt students’ use of feedback was also improved. An impressive 94% felt they experienced productivity/efficiency gains since using FeedbackFruits and 100% wanted to continue using the platform. From the student (n=40) perspective, 85% agreed FeedbackFruits was intuitive and easy to use with 67% agreeing their activities provided them with useful feedback. While 65% agreed FeedbackFruits activities increased their interaction and engagement with their course, 52% felt this helped improve critical thinking skills.
Overall, the technology has proved itself to be helpful particularly for the administration of group activities where peer assessment and team evaluations are involved.
What did we learn?
Both staff and students agreed the platform is easy to use. However, like any tool, with more complicated scenarios comes an increasing increased number of options and settings and this sometimes affected usability.
Peer review was a popular activity where students were asked to provide feedback on work submitted by their classmates. Staff felt the platform-supported administration of these activities to be helpful and efficient.
Group Member Evaluation was also used multiple times, to allow students working in teams to review the performance of its members. Students were more critical of peer review as an assessment activity, requiring clearer instruction on why this was a useful learning approach (e.g. a work related, employability skill needed in many careers).
We also learned that these tools can be used for a variety of assessment scenarios. Some examples:
- Providing multiple (formative) check in points for teams to review the performance of team members. This helped create a sense of responsibility to the team, reducing the number of complaints of poor participation by some. By reviewing against consistent criteria, staff could monitor team working methods more easily, helping to identify teams in need of support.
- Using peer review to support role playing exercises, where students could place themselves in the roles of practitioner, client or professional colleague to provide feedback for an authentic project.
- Using peer review exercises to build academic writing skills or developing assessment literacy. Students could review work against rubric criteria designed to scaffold their understanding of how marking criteria supports their learning as well as assessing their progress.
We also learned that some in some cases, workarounds were needed to meet some university processes around assessment. For example, as an external tool FeedbackFruits activities were not accessible in Moodle archives, and Ouriginal could not report on student work submitted through a FeedbackFruits activity.
What happens next?
Going forward, we’ll continue to provide FeedbackFruits in Moodle for the Faculty of Engineering & Design, starting 1 July 2025. Their funded licence is for 3 years giving time for staff to fully explore the benefits of seven tools in the Feedback & Assessment solution. In TEL we will continue to gather feedback and provide support, and we aim to work in collaboration to share good practice.
Guidance is being written for the Teaching Hub and training sessions are being planned. Staff in Engineering & Design, should contact TEL if they have specific questions or requirements. For staff not in FED, the licence gives the option for other faculties/school to gain access to the tools (at a cost) within the first two years of the contract. Please get in touch with Marie Salter, Head of TEL, if further details are needed.
We understand that staff who have used FeedbackFruits during the pilot may want to explore alternatives for the activities they developed, and we have ‘alternatives’ guidance on where they can get started. If there are more questions or specific advice is needed, please get in touch via email (tel@bath.ac.uk).
