FeedbackFruits: Best Practice for teachers and supporting staff

Overview

FeedbackFruits assignment setup

  • Creating Blackboard Groups for group activities
  • Taking care of Blackboard Student Preview account
  • Choosing the right tool and understanding its options
  • Copying FeedbackFruits assignments
  • Being cautious about FeedbackFruits assignment availability
  • Setting deadlines
  • Turning Anonymity ON if needed
  • Managing visibility of Feedback and Grades

Data management

  • Avoid deletion
  • Backing up the data

Advice for students

  • Referring to the user guides for students
  • Having better user experience
  • Anonymous assignments
  • Ensuring on-time and correct submissions
  • Review process for students
  • When do I receive notifications?

For details of the points above, please refer to the following.


FeedbackFruits assignment setup

Creating Blackboard Groups for group activities

For evaluation involving groups, you are advised to create groups in your Blackboard course at least a day after the add-drop period (i.e., when/after the course enrollment in the Blackboard course is basically confirmed).

 

Taking care of Blackboard Student Preview account

Please note that Blackboard student preview account will be considered as a student on FeedbackFruits and may affect the allocation.

 

Choosing the right tool and understanding its options

Please go through FeedbackFruits Help:  Which tool is most suitable for me?

Group Member Evaluation and Peer Review are the two common tools used for peer evaluation. Please understand their options before setting up your assignment:

The following three settings about collaboration and allocations, mentioned in the user guides above, are crucial:

  • Student collaboration: setting the assignments to be handed in and reviewed individually or in groups. 
  • Required number of peers to review: If you are going to carry out within-group evaluation or review (e.g., individuals evaluating all other group memebrs), please select ‘All peers’ for this option.
  • Allocations: FeedbackFruits suggest selecting ‘Automatically - One by one’ for Peer Review. For details about allocations: FeedbackFruits | How are peers assigned?

 

Copying FeedbackFruits assignments

You can copy FeedbackFruits assignment from one course to another: FeedbackFruits Help: Can I copy an existing FeedbackFruits assignment from my LMS?

  • When copying from existing, always remember to rename the activity, so you don't end up with multiple duplicated activities with the same name. This could become confusing later when you're trying to find the particular/updated version.
  • After copying, also remember to update and check the name of the FeedbackFruits assignment link in Blackboard to make it aligned with the name in FeedbackFruits. (To learn how to edit Blackboard items’ name: Blackboard Help: Edit and Manage Content (Original) | Edit and manage content (Ultra))
  • Please remember to check and update the settings (especially settings related to deadlines or groups) of the FeedbackFruits assignment in the destination course after copying. 

 

Being cautious about FeedbackFruits assignment availability

After you click ‘Save’, the activity will be posted and available to students. Make it unavailable in the Blackboard content area if you do not want students to access it at the moment (Blackboard Help: Edit and Manage Content (Original) | Edit and manage content (Ultra))

Please check the options before releasing the assignment to students.

 

Setting deadlines

Students can update their submissions and feedback before the deadlines. Please set deadlines (or even make the link unavailable to students in Blackboard if necessary) to make sure that no modification can be made when/after you start your review and/or grading.

 

Turning Anonymity ON if needed

For Peer Review, it will be possible to enable both Reviewer and Submitter anonymity whereas in Group Member Evaluation, only Reviewer anonymity will be available.

By default, submitter anonymity and reviewer anonymity are ‘OFF’, which means students can see who the submitters and reviewers are. Remember to turn them ‘ON’ if you do not want students to identify the submitters and reviewers.

For Peer Review, if anonymity is ‘ON’, students should not include their personal information (e.g., name, Student ID) inside the file and the submission file name.

 

Managing visibility of Feedback and Grades

By default, ‘Visibility: Students see their received feedback’ is set as 'Immediately', which means students will see their received feedback as soon as it is posted. If necessary, turn it to ‘Never (release manually)’.

Once you publish grades, students will be able to view the grades in the FeedbackFruits assignment. Also, the grades will be published to Blackboard Grade Center. You need to hide the FeedbackFruits assignments and Blackboard Original Grade Center columns (including related calculated column, such as ‘Total’. Click here to learn more about hiding Grade column), in case you would like to keep the grades on Blackboard but don’t want to release them to students..

 

Data management

Avoid deletion

DO NOT delete FeedbackFruits assignment links OR Blackboard Groups in your Blackboard course after they have started. The submissions, feedback, and data could be affected or even cannot be accessed after the deletion.

 

Backing up the data

Please expect the data in the assignment will be removed when the accounts are no longer valid on Blackboard or in Blackboard courses. You are advised to back up the information before the term ends, e.g.,

  • Export analytics
  • Download submissions
  • Download reviews

Please also handle the downloaded data with care following applicable data policies.

 

Advice for students

Referring to the user guides for students

For Group Member Evaluation and Peer Review, students should refer to pages under ‘Student Perspective’:

For other tools, please refer to other articles on FeedbackFruits Help.

 

Having better user experience

Students are advised to use a computer for working on the assignments. It is because items (especially tables) may not fully display in small screens.

 

Anonymous assignments

Do NOT include personal information (e.g., name, Student ID) inside the file and the submission file name if the peer review assignment is set as anonymous.

 

Ensuring on-time and correct submissions

Students might not be allowed to review their peers if they are not managed to hand in their work on time. Also, please note that wrong submissions cannot be revised once the deadline has past and your work has been assigned to your peers. So please check carefully when you submit your work.

 

Review process for students

Depending on the set up, students will need to remember to click on the ‘start’ button to continue with the next review after completing one review. Additionally, when providing comments to their peers, while the comments will be saved for later, it is not considered as submitted, hence students should always remember to click on ‘post’ to ensure that the comments are logged.

 

When do I receive notifications?

FeedbackFruits sends out notification emails to students about things happening in learning activities. Every day around 18.00 hour (local server time) we will send out a summary mail to users if there are new activities in their assignment, notifying them about important things that have happened in their FeedbackFruits activities in the last 24 hours. Upcoming deadlines, replies and new comments will be included in the summary email.

However, we still advise students to access the Blackboard course regularly to check out updates and activities on Blackboard (i.e., do not solely rely on email notifications).

 

Should you have any questions, please contact us at elearning@cuhk.edu.hk.