In the second Pathways to Innovation SIG meeting for 2023, Eugenie Hsueh, Australian Pilot and Partner Success Manager for FeedbackFruits, introduced us to FeedbackFruits, a tool suite which will be piloted by TechDems in semester two this year.
The focus of FeedbackFruits is revealed by its name: the suite focuses on allowing students to give and receive feedback, enabling self-reflection, peer-to-peer feedback, and teacher-to-student feedback. Eugenie briefly introduced us to the full tool suite, which includes:
- Tools for authentic assessment and peer feedback,
- Tools for collaborative learning and social annotation,
- Tools for engagement and interaction.
The main focus for the session, however, was on the tool Peer Review. This is an extraordinarily powerful tool which allows students to upload files (documents, videos, etc) for review. You have a number of options when constructing this task and can include all or one of these:
- Self-reflection: Students can be guided through a reflective process where they are asked to annotate their own work, identifying components you have selected. Additionally, students could be given the opportunity to ‘rank’ their work using a FeedbackFruits template which you can customise for the task.
- Peer-to-peer feedback: Student submissions are allocated to one or more peers. (This can be an anonymised process.) Peers are then stepped through the process of providing appropriate feedback, using prompts within FeedbackFruits to provide annotations on student submissions and/or ‘rank’ them.
- Staff-to-student feedback likewise allows for the provision of feedback through annotations within the student’s work or additional ‘rankings’. These ‘rankings’ can be constructed based on FeedbackFruits templates, which range from simple Likert scales to complex marking rubrics for formal assessment tasks.
Naturally, the benefits for students are many. Each student has the opportunity to both give and receive feedback, with both processes developing their knowledge and understanding.
My first experiences with FeedbackFruits were very positive. The suite of tools is diverse and each has multiple possibilities, yet planning and creating my first example was quick and easy. I felt as if I was working with a group of colleagues, as prompts within the system and the templates provided allowed me to quickly create an activity tailored to my students.
The good news is that we begin our pilot of FeedbackFruits in S2, 2023. Would you like to join?
Key insight:
FeedbackFruits fills a gap in our current tool suite: the capacity to asynchronously provide detailed and specific feedback on practical (recorded) tasks.
Many courses across the university, from theatre to paramedicine, nursing, education, and visual arts, rely on practical tasks, yet we have no clear way to provide asynchronous feedback on them. Peer Review allows students to upload videos, with feedback given through annotations within the videos as well as additional documentation.
