Fostering Authentic Assessment at Texas A&M University: From Rubrics to Real Life

Start by introducing ourselves. So my name is Cole groom. I the partnership's team lead at feedback fruits, and I've been working with Patty and her team at Texas A and M on their usage of feedback fruits, in this this last year. So Patty if you wanna introduce yourself. Hi. I'm Patty Luna.

I work at Texas Her name at the School of Public Health. And I've been working in the higher education field for twenty years. So it's been a long journey for me. I come from Mexico, and I moved to the US thirteen years ago. I work at a private institution in Mexico, Teque de Monterey, if you have heard of it.

We work very much with technologies. I started using lots of notes, to submit assignments, then we moved to Web City, and because we had a part ship with UVC, and then we moved to Blackboard, and I worked with Blackboard for probably fifteen years. And finally, we moved to Canvas three years ago. So it's been a long journey for me. I have tried many, educational technologies and working, as an instructional designer at tech It's like a passion for me.

I'm blessed that my passion is my job. So I just, want to share the things that I have work with Canvas, feedback, fruits, and this partnership. Yeah. Absolutely. Because what we wanna talk today is about authentic assessment.

So finding ways that we can take assessments away from these traditional multiple choice and bring them into ways that develop skills for students. And so this has become ever more present now with the advent of ChachiPT and generative AI. Looking at assessment examples that can't be easily copied, by AI. And so this is just a quote from, Mark Sharpels is like a and educational technology from the Open University because if there's ever a time to rethink assessment, it's right now. It's time it's not the time to outwit AI.

Let's harness what we can do with AI for learning. And so as we look at different ways that we can transform assess to make them more, authentic to make them more holistic and effective for the students learning process. These are a couple of the key areas that we pull and have thought about when we look at transforming assessments. So making them continuous and holistic of the entire course, but also making them multimodal, giving students different ways that they interact with content that they create in their courses, and present their knowledge assessment in different ways. But we also wanna do so in a way that is skill based.

We don't just want students to regurgitate knowledge. We want them to demonstrate what they've learned. And the skills that they've developed throughout their time and through their courses. And then by doing so, by having these different types of assessment, it gives us opportunity to have formative alongside summative opportunities for students, which in turn makes them all seem multi layer so that it's not just one-sided where it's always the the teacher assessing the student, but that there's also some peer to peer learning involved in getting students to take ownership of that learning process and of how they interact with assessments. And so what that really summarizes is this idea of authentic assessment.

So this is just a general definition of authentic assessment that we pulled for some recent research But overall, it's a task that's contextualized within a realistic environment and helps students to use their knowledge to demonstrate skills and attitudes which are gonna be required of them in the workplace, but also for themselves as a citizen in the community. And that's why authentic assessment is so important. And why the work that we've been doing with Patty at Texas A and M has been so, interesting over the last year. And so if we wanted to compare some examples of what is tradition assessment versus an authentic assessment task. These traditional assessments are gonna be very familiar to to many of us here.

So multiple choice questions, recall, instructor design, single opportunity. So just a midterm and a final exam, and that determines your fate of the entire course. Creates a lot of stress for students. But also doesn't get them to engage in the course the way that is the best for their learning process. So as we look at transforming those to being more authentic tasks, we want them to perform specific actions to their knowledge.

We want them to justify why they've come to a specific solution or an idea, so making them back up what they're saying when they they give their answers, whether they're actually applying some of the knowledge that they've learned to a real world scenario, or that that's a case study or team based learning, like we're gonna talk about, we want them to also be learner driven, learner designed, but also iterative. So where students get multiple opportunities to improve their work, receive feedback, and get better as the class goes on rather than just having two opportunities in the course to see how they're doing. And we want to be able to assess the direct evidence of learning. And so some of the reasons why this can be beneficial to implement authentic assessment in your courses. It helps to increase student autonomy and get them to self regulate their learning.

But it also, like we mentioned, develops these career readiness skills, which is what we're here as the universities to do is to get students ready to go out into the real world and, be a productive part of society. So we want to develop assessment in a way that helps to create those skills that they take with them. Through authentic assessment and also creates options for students, different learning paths where they get to see in what formats of of types of assignments that they perform best and what's their best fit. And we want to be able to guide them through and tailor that to individual students' needs. But it's not easy.

It can be quite challenging to implement this one in the beginning, instructors to have that mind shift to go more towards authentic assessment. Even from the administrative level, there can be some challenges with this. We need to have effective and consistent rubrics. We need to tie the criteria of the assessment back to the course materials continuously. Facilitating quality peer and instructor feedback in a large course cohort Yeah.

It can be very time consuming and difficult, so we wanna see ways to to reduce that. But we wanna make sure that there's still oversight of student progress. And that there's still some granular growth oriented grading along the way. So that's some of the challenges that Patty has been facing. As we went and took on this project.

But feedback fruits was one of the technologies which was able to help them facilitate this delivery of these different authentic assessments. So feedback fruits has fifteen different tools that are built on evidence based pedagogies and bring them directly into the Canvas environment. We're gonna look at a number of these different assignment examples today, which Patty will present. But overall, we have a really wide variety of things like peer to peer feedback, social annotations, team based learning, which we're gonna see, and make it scalable. Everything can be templated, reused.

Patty's gonna tell you a lot about how they were able to get a significant amount of instructors and students using these tools and just one semester's time, and that's the examples that we're gonna talk about. So like I mentioned, it's integrated directly into Canvas LTI one point three plus API. So it syncs all the grades, all the groups, pushes the deadlines to the calendar. So trying to that as simple as possible when delivering these different types of assessments. But that leaves it to Patty to tell you a little bit more about her department and, and what she's done.

Okay. So, who is, who in the room is faculty? If you can raise your hand. Okay. So the rest of you is, staff admins. Yes.

Okay. Good. I'm gonna try to, like my conversation. We had a pilot the Tamu Health that included these five schools. And then, one of the offices, the office of interprofessional education has a program that runs along the, the five schools.

And we were able to combine more than five no. More than five hundred students in one course from all different schools. And as you as you can, imagine, it is difficult to just put together the med students then we were able to put all of the students from the five schools together in a course com in a course community in Canvas. And, I'll talk about more of where we use a team based learning. So, We, we just piloted feedback fruits since January and to June, July, but we started these conversations, like, in April last year.

So it took us a few months to research why, we were choosing FigF efforts. And we were comparing the, the current tools that we had in Canvas, but then, fit properly, had, specific and unique, tools, and that's why we choose the suite. So one of those, is team based learning. And as far as I know, feedback the only company that has team based learning that integrates with Canvas. And that made a lot of difference because we just want to make things easier for faculty and to, sync groups from, different schools and different sections in just one with one click.

And there are some, you know, some other platforms in the market, but they don't integrate with Canvas, and that was like a plus for So what we're going to talk today is some tips that we found out through the implementation of this project when it comes to implementing all this authentic assessment and then look at how we use those tips during these different types of assignments at Texas A and L. And so the first tip that we have when it comes to building out authentic assessment is to establish clear objectives and goals for students. So using rubrics to be able to communicate that students of what's gonna be expected to them. But as you're using these rubrics, you wanna make sure that there's a relative consistency across that student course program to make sure that the expectations that they're coming to into each course are relatively similar and that they're working in developing those skills, uniformly across the different courses throughout their program. So what we do with Texas A and M was to template a lot these rubrics so that they could really be easily pulled from the library and implemented across different types of assessment throughout the different departments.

Throughout the different courses that the students would go through throughout the semester. And this is a little bit about how how Patty set this up. Yeah. So in, we use I'm using some examples from Public Health. This was for the environmental, course.

And the professor set up the rubric for a writing assignment, but she gave the students an opportunity to write a draft and being reviewed by by peers and then also the automated feedback. So the automated feedback is a unique tool in fit backwards that gives some, recommendations in the writing So it, I think in the next I don't know if the next slide, I have how the the content can be reviewed by the software So it can it can, check for work on the language, the sentence link. If you are using active or passive voice, for me that English is not my first language. That was very useful. And we do have a lot of international students, and they they were very grateful that they were using these tools, so it gave them a lot of feedback.

But also, it also, reviews the, citation style. So we were using APA. And, the faculty member I think I don't know if we have in the next slide. The faculty member saw a lot of improvement from the draft to the final assign assessment. So that's the rubric that we use in the the same rubric used in the in the assignments, in the draft and the final.

And as you can see, FigPA Fris has a very visual way to see results. So I don't see this in Canvas as is is that is the way. So you can see that in the proficient, column on the first graphic. We had a few students there, and then that's the draft. And then the second is the final.

So we were able to, compare the results from the draft to the final, how students were improving. And that was, like, a very, significant result for faculties she wasn't focused. She was focused on the content rather than checking every sentence and how they wrote the assignment and all that. So the automated feedback was able to give them some feedback in the draft and then they improve in the final. And that's one of the benefits of setting up the assessment in this way is first the students work on a draft.

They can submit it as many times as they want to the automated feedback coach. Which helps them to improve some of these lower order skills, their use of citations, their their academic writing. And then they go through the peer review where they actually get to compare themselves against each other and their classmates to see, you know, what other people are doing, and they get some feedback from their peers of things they can improve before they ultimately turn this in for it to be graded by their teacher. And so that's where you see on the right hand side, this rubric, where then all the students, in the end, received, you know, full marks for their presentation and their use of citations in the paper, by having this chances for iterative feedback along the way before that final submission. That kind of brings us to our, to our second tip.

And so, besides for setting expectations, we want to encourage higher levels of collaboration. And one of the really great ways to do that is team based learning. And so if we were to look at team based learning in its traditional form. These scratch cards might look very familiar to you. How many of you are are using team based learning at your institution or familiar with the, with the pedagogy.

Yeah. Just a few of us. And so that's because a lot of times it can be very time consuming and tedious to implement. This is a look at how it was done traditionally with these scratch cards. In this way that teachers had to set up these scratch cards, students would have take the quizzes face to face.

So they're using their synchronous time to to do these these quizzes where you take it as an individual. Then you go and take it as a team. And then the teacher would have to collect all of those scratch cards and then average the scores, put them back into the LMS and then that could be hours and hours of work for each course section. So what we're able to do with feedback fruits is to digitize that. Bring it into the canvas environment so that students can do it outside of their traditional synchronous class time.

And so this is kind of a look at the full TBL workflow, where students first prepare for their class. They look at the materials. They get ready for the quizzes. They take this IRAT, the individual readiness assurance test by themselves, then they take it together with group. So where they're able to collaborate with each other, talk about the questions and and problem solve through these different questions.

Then there will also be after that kind of clarification session, which the teacher can talk a little bit more about what went well, what some of the trick questions might have been. And then also usually do an application exercise where they'll apply some of that knowledge that they learned by going through those different IRAT and T Rat quizzes. And then ultimately, they can also evaluate each other in the group of how they collaborated. What were their soft skills? How did they participate during that excerpt? Size. And so this is a look of how this process can be facilitated by feedback fruits.

It's a use of know, a couple of the different tools in our tool suite, but we integrate this into this individual assignment inside of Canvas. So they go through start with some social annotation where they can, do the pre class preparation. They do the IRAT in the T RAT. There's a couple of sessions, which are done, here with kind of zoom icons, which because this was conducted in a fully online class. So they didn't have the opportunity to be meaning synchronously to do the IRAT in the TRAT quizzes.

They would use our discussion on work tool to do a gallery walk and the application exercise. And then at the end, they could could do a, a group member evaluation or a peer evaluation as it's called here. So for the courses, we were able to, the students were meeting in a Zoom meeting, with a facilitator. So we had seventy faculty members that acted as facilitators. We had a group of, academics, setting up all of the assignments for the course, for everybody.

So, because one group was setting up all of the assignments, the facilitators didn't need the training to use feedback efforts, to go and check the grades, check the, comments on the peer reviews, the work that each group, was making, and The advantage of thick passwords is that in TBL, because you have all these steps, you need to use several tools, not just the IRAT and TRAT but the peer, peer review, the application, and all of that can be very struggling and challenging if you are using so many tools to accomplish the team based learning. The advantage of your efforts is that all of the all of the tools have the same UX So once you, are familiar with one assignment, all, the rest of the tools have the same, layout and the steps. So for faculty, it's very, it's very good for for them. So just I'm sorry. They just follow the steps to complete and set up the assignment.

And the same for the students. So for the students, they, it's very useful that they go and complete one, two, three, four steps. And, it's same, UX for all of the, all of the tools. So one of the reasons we really wanted to look at team based learning for this set of courses is because students are coming together from all the different departments in the the health science center. So we have medical students working people from pharmacy, working with people from the school of public health, and we want to coach them to develop these skills of how they're going to interact with other health professionals in their future careers developing this collaboration.

So that's why the team based learning was a really great way to develop those skills, and to do so in way in a fully online course, was something that, really hadn't been done before, at least, in the health sciences. Yeah. So the challenge for TBL in per person and online was to meet all those students in their discussion session. And once they were together in the the school meeting, they were able to do the and then discuss the application in a separate, platform, like, maybe a Google doc and then working on the assignment and then submitting the the assignment for the final review. And the group member evaluation was very significant because feedback fruits allows to close the cycle.

So you are giving a peer review to your to your peer but then if you don't read the feedback that someone gave you, then you don't care. And feedback efforts allows to close that cycle. So it is important for the faculty because this is, they are learning skills that go to real life. So they are doctors, nurses, and, then to dentists and some other, health, professions. So they need to learn how to receive feedback from others because in real life, They need to learn how to work together, not just the doctors, with doctors, but they work as a team.

So, fleet efforts were was able to provide these way to learn how to receive feedback from others. And it was important for the faculty that each of them was reading the feedback from their peers. And this is nothing new when it comes to TBL. This is the purpose of this pedagogy, but it was great to realize it in the way that we implemented it here where seeing that the students are scoring higher on these same quizzes when they were working together in a team compared to when they would do it individually So it shows the power of collaboration and the importance of getting students to work together so that they can recognize that they work stronger together rather than by themselves. Yeah.

And then this is a little bit about the group evaluation. I think you, talked about this, but it's, if the time Yeah. And we in the group every member evaluation. I don't know. Have you had any faculty that those group member evaluation and, were format or Google form, Qualtrich surveys, or just in paper.

Yes. They have to go and get all of the pay and work and enter manually all of the grades and calculate with a spreadsheet and formulas, all that work. And I don't know, but my my faculty told me I spend eight hours doing this per assignment. And when I showed her how to do this, she was like, this is magic. Please give it to me for the next year.

And who do I talk to so I can have it for the next year? It's saving a lot of time for faculty so they can if if they if they don't have to do this, they can focus on research on writing or something else. So it was really useful for our faculty. You can have your assignment, your rubric, and it also gives, like, let's say, for example, they're working on a project together. And you have a column to enter the grade for the project, and then you have another column for the group contribution factor So the software identifies these outliers. And these these these are things that are gonna happen in real life.

Who work more on your project, who work less, and who had conflicts in the team. So the software was able to identify that the faculty member was receiving those emails from from students. Like, I think I received a lot of, bad feedback from my peers because I was missing classes and they didn't rate me well on this assignment. So it, it, it clicked when with the feedback that the faculty member received with the results in the software. So that's like a really high end plus for the for the software.

Yeah. And one thing that we usually notice when you implement things like this group member evaluation, students generally when they know that this is coming at the end of the assignment that they actually participate more because they realize that it's gonna be a part of their period. So just by measuring it, you can prevent a lot of this free riding that can and take place when it comes to to group work. And, on the last slide, you'll notice just at the bottom, I do wanna give a shout out to Doctor. Chris Jonas who, helped us to implement and really this TBL pedagogy bringing it to the interprofessional education courses was, kinda her her brainchild she wasn't able to be here with us today, but, she definitely deserves a shout out on, on all the work she's done when it comes to this project.

Then it brings us to our third tip. That was the end of the team based learning example, but also what we wanna do is use multimodal activities, different types of content and formats for students to consume, but also to collaborate with each other. So what Patty's gonna talk about is how we use different forms of social annotation to actually guide students, through knowledge checks. So through the course materials, keeping them engaged, but also turning studying we're going through any any type of course content from an individual experience into a collaborative one, creating community. Within the classes? So for for these tools, we use articles.

We use chapters from from books. We use videos. We are using media sites so we were able to use media site links. So I don't have I didn't have to upload the video again. I was just, reducing the link and making the video public.

So it wasn't any interference with the authentication. You also can use a YouTube link or your own videos that you can upload to the assignments. And we were using them for discussions, for social annotations, for embedding questions, and you can embed, multiple choice questions, but also open open questions. So it opens up I it opens the form for students to discuss on one topic or one part of the reading or one part of the video. And something that was very useful is that we were able to download chapters from the library, and I checked with the library, we were downloading the chapters from the library for the textbooks.

So the students don't have to pay the one hundred and thirty dollars for the book. And we were uploading the chapters to these, interactive, document and, not allowing the students to download the chapter, but reading the chapter in the platform and embedding some questions there. So the the faculty can prove that students go and read all and answering some questions there. And it it wasn't just the, multiple choice, quiz in Canvas. But, putting the students together reading and watching a video.

So that's gonna make a significant change in how we are providing the learning materials to students because they're gonna save a lot of money. And and we just need to check that the chapters are available to be downloaded from the library, and we do have some limitations that it's just day by day, but not allowing them to download the materials so we're not, violating any copy rights. And, we double checked with the librating, and it was okay. So, that was also, something good for for both parts. Yeah.

And this screenshot that you see here, this is from one of these real assignments that took place, at the school of public health. And, I mean, look at how long the discussions are that the students are creating within this document. There was. Oh, I wish I had the analytics here, but there's dozens and dozens of threads under each of these discussion posts that the students created. So it really opened up this space students were critically thinking about the materials that they were reading, but also able to ask questions and to share their opinions and to hear what the thoughts were across the class.

So it created this really collaborative space. They were also doing this in classes with a really large class size. So we were able to put students into groups of about twenty five. So we limited this to a smaller cohort, within the class. So in groups of twenty five, they go through and complete these discussions, inside of Canvas.

So they all see their own kind of unique set of discussions to record those questions. Yeah. The advantage was that the reading and the discussion was in one place. So they didn't have to go and read the article and then go back to the version. And then, I forgot what the article was saying, and then checking back and forth.

So that was, something good for the students And also for the online students, they they felt that they were interacting with their peers. Even though they don't know each other, they haven't met in person, So that was a way to, engage students and, have enabled in this collaboration online. Oh, so we do have a little bit of the of the analytics, actually. I forgot it was on this slide, but so here you can see we set up activities with seven hundred and thirteen students participating of those seven hundred thirteen students they created over one thousand seven hundred and seventy three comments. I think that's, engagement levels that are typically higher than what we would see in a traditional discussion board and that's the impact that you bring.

By having the discussions directly inside of the study materials. So a really great way to, incentivize the students participation, but you'll notice here also the insights that the that the faculty member receives as far as the student's progress, have they viewed the document, Did they go into it? How did they perform on the questions? So a great way to inform the lesson planning, identify knowledge gaps, and then also see the number of comments that each of the students inside of the document. And our fourth tip here is, when it comes to authentic assessment, we wanna sure that students are getting personalized, but specifically skill oriented feedback. So this starts back at the first tip when it comes to establishing really good rubrics. Clear criteria that we want the students to be working on, but then it comes to the to the faculty member to be giving that feedback.

And so Pat is gonna talk a little bit about how we facilitated this process of encouraging this personalized and skills oriented back to take place. Who is anyone from Instructure or Canvas here? No? Alright. Who has who has heard that they don't want to use this peak grader because every annotation that faculty makes triggers a notification. Yes. Okay.

Every one by one annotation that you do in the assignments when you're reviewing an assignment triggers one notification for the students. So if you make thirty annotations on this, on the assignments, that's gonna be three notifications on students in. So one that's one complaint from faculty. And the we compare it with thick efforts. That doesn't trigger, notifications.

And that also when you give feedback, everything that you, review it's tied to the rubric. So when you are providing the feedback, it's, associate in line feedback with the rubric criteria. So that was very powerful for faculty because she was giving a specific feedback tied to something that she had in the rubric. And, it it also, as I said, it closes the cycle that it gives the students points for reading their received feedback. So that also was something that the faculty wanted to to have in the assignment.

So, I'm giving the feedback, but then you read it, and it's going to be, powerful for the students to know what needs to be improved in the assignment. Yeah. And so, a couple of the things to highlight here is that when teachers are giving feedback in the document, there's also a space for students to respond to it. So it creates this space for a dialogue when it comes to giving feedback to students rather than a student having to send a separate email or a canvas message, which easily gets lost. You don't know which assignments they're talking about, which comments specifically they're referring to.

So bringing that dialogue about feedback into the assignment, into the document that they turned in is a great way to to have that in online courses. Very relevant for RSI guidelines. Things of this nature. But you can also give students points to actually go in and view their feedback. Because a lot of times if it's a final assignment, students will come in.

They see that they passed and then we're we're done, right? Time to time for the next course. But if they want to get full credit, you can associate some points for students going in and reading their feedback, especially as the faculty member, giving your valuable time to try to help those students improve and get better at their coursework you wanna make sure that that's being received, as far as. Yeah. What what the feedback was? And that brings us to our fifth tip here about authentic assessment. And we wanna emphasize problem solving in real world examples.

I think a couple of the previous examples that we talked about already embodied this in the way that that Patty implemented them in the in the health science courses. But I wanted to provide a couple of other examples, from different departments of these types of problems solving in real world examples of assess that you can use on your courses. So this is just a few small examples. So for business, you might want to have them do a case study where they design a solution for workplace problem, computer scientists. We can do all sorts of different types of assignments, building websites, building different mock, products.

Health science, who wanna talk about ethics, things of this nature, in English, maybe writing a satirical essay examining a social phenomenon, so getting them to apply that knowledge that they're using to something that's out there in the real world. And so this one, I think, is a little bit more aspirational. Some of our plans for the future. At the school of, public health, but, Pat, if you wanna talk about this. Yes.

So I think, for the Interprofessional Education course, they are asking the students to submit a video with the proposal. The course was focused on ethics in the health professions. So they were given a case and then they were starting the case and provide some solutions. They created this video. So in the future, we want the students to upload the video as a video assignment.

So if faculty can provide the feedback in the specific point on in the video, I think This is probably more towards the nursing where they submit something like, they record how they perform a skill or a specific procedure, right, or for the vet school, or something more specific like how you are performing a task. So that's, useful for both students and faculty. Yeah. And I think it's becomes really relevant now, again, with ChatPT and generative AI finding ways that we can shift away from some of the more traditional writing assignments and have students to demonstrate their skills. So I've worked on a couple of examples where we took, an essay that students would write and then transformed it where students would actually use chatty BT to generate some of that work.

And then they would record a podcast with their group rather than writing an say. So even if you use Chad GPT for the whole thing, you still have to read it out loud. So you probably learned something along the way. Right? But Ultimately, when you shift towards these more diverse deliverables, you don't want to sacrifice the quality of feedback that students are giving. Because if let's say you submit this in Canvas, you'd have to listen to the whole thing, and then you give feedback as a sum of the entire recording.

Whereas here when we use tools like the peer review or like the assignment review tool that we looked at in the last example, the time stamp is given or sorry, the feedback is given time stamped within that video or within that audio file. So it allows you to leave much more specific feedback. Then again associating those comments back to the rubric. So making sure that we are still giving high quality feedback as we shift different types of deliverables. And you'll notice just the sum of the results of the use of the different feedback tools, the peer review, and the group member evaluation, during the pilot at at Texas A and M.

So students were giving each other on average about sixty eight ratings and leaving sixteen comments per student for each other when they were giving feedback in these different types of assignments. But, ninety seven percent of their feed of the students received feedback from their peers. And there was, over two thousand nine hundred units of feedback written across. Just a handful of courses. So really enhancing the amount of, but also the quality of the feedback that's happening through setting up these different, these different types of assignments.

And so these are from from Patty Department. Talk about these a little bit more, but this is just some of the experience that, the students and the teachers had during the pilot. Yeah. So I'm not gonna read through those, but We got testimonials from faculty, testimonials from students. I launched a survey with, students for two classes.

We received three hundred, responses from them and, evaluating the tools if they were if they made a change in their assignments and in their courses, it was a very positive, comments from them. And as I said, some faculty is just asking, to continue using the tools because they're they're very useful. Saving hours of work, building friendships in a fully online course, taking skills to help them in their professional career. Just a couple highlights of of things that that we were able to achieve in this this really short period. But I wanna wrap it up in more of a conclusions kinda generally about authentic assessment.

So as a summary, We can use authentic assessments as a holistic way to, assess students on their skills and their knowledge compared to traditional assessment. To do so, we wanna create multiple means of engagement through diverse types of learning activities, which can enhance the student skill development. Teachers are more likely to innovate their learning design when provided with the right technology to support them. So in a way that makes it easy to implement these different types of complex which otherwise can be very time consuming. And, yeah, not simple to facilitate.

But then overall peer to peer learning and collaboration just really effective methods to improve student learning and engagement. And this is nothing new, but just something that we're trying to make easier and lower those barriers, for for faculty in different departments too. So, so that's a little bit what we had to talk. Maybe if I had any wrap ups on your side, but I'd also love to leave some time for questions think we can go to the questions. If you have any quick yes.

I fly too, but I don't wanna come here all the time. One of them is around I'm curious about the user experience, both faculty and students. Are they leaving Canvas to engage in these tools? Are they leading speed greater to breathe. So it is when they're, Yeah. Absolutely.

So this is a look at feedback fruits. Inside of Canvas. It's fully integrated. There's no separate platform. There's no separate logins.

These groups are synced from the the enrollments in Canvas. And all the grades you see here, you see them in feedback fruits, but they're synced, with with the grade center. No. So right now you create the rubrics in feedback fruits. We're working on an integration that pulls the existing rubrics in.

But once you create the rubric for the first time in feedback for it to get saved as a template, you can save your templates to an individual user, the departmental level, you can even create institutional rubric templates, which are available. And you can share your your rubrics with other faculty members. My second question is actually, about accreditation. I I know a lot of assessments are linked accreditation. And so, yeah, what was your experience with piloting this and and moving out I I I I know in our university, at least, like, we have some very authentic assessments that they they are Right.

Yes. We have, we have identified the outcomes for, course. And, yeah, we have imported all of those outcomes in Canvas. So faculty can go and die the outcomes in the rubrics. That just happens in the campus assignments or the new quizzes.

We haven't, done anything with the outcomes and feedback efforts, but I think that's in the, near future. And so we have a lot of way to track the student progress as they go through the assignments, their engagement, their levels, time spent, and then when it comes to the rubrics, kind of getting these high level overviews of the student performance. So we do have ways to track kind of how these assignments are going back to competency development, or specific learning outcomes. For, for example. I I this is the question I get from back with you all the time because I can you print out everything my students have done to the last, you know, six semesters so I can submit this, you know, evidence of, you know, learning and how what are your analytics? Yeah.

So, I have some things that I could show. See you later, but we have a competency based education platform. We pulled through the student result across all the different types of assessments and associate them to the competency and skill development, which then students can export as the skill passport, which can be used for accreditation or can be used for them on their their CVs and job applications to demonstrate what they learned across. Across their studies. Yeah.

How's the accessibility? It's a WeCAG AA two point o. So accessible with all screen readers and and up up to most standards. It can be. So that's an optional setting, by the teacher. Some people prefer it.

Some people don't. It can be anonymous. Same with the social annotations. You can also do those anonymously, where they create and participate in discussions. Without revealing identity as well.

So when they're testing in, like, their group and the groups submit one test. Yeah. Only one student submits and it associates to all the students in the group. Does does the it it does the the allocations automatically. And I'm gonna say something as, say that you have your groups in Canvas, and then some students drop the class, and then you added more students.

Every time that you enter to the fit reference assignment, it updates the Canvas roster, and it updates the groups, and it updates the sync. And you don't to check, like, who is where and all that. It does everything automatically. Yeah. They were copied.

Yeah. Mhmm. I intact it. How long is it for the faculty professional development to be able to use this? How much time? I'm very fortunate that our faculty, probably ninety I was talking to someone here, ninety percent of our faculty are very self sufficient and self learners. They were able to pick up all the UX very easily.

We have a lot of resources from them, like tutorials and videos, and we were putting those, guidelines in the assignments. Some of them require a lot more training, like, side to side. But I would say that the UX is pretty easy to use. And maybe if you get familiar with the tool within a week, you're gonna get familiar with the rest of the tools because all of the tools have the same UX, and then they just have different settings. Some of the tools are very easy to to, create and set up.

Some of them are a little bit more, they take more time, like the TBL probably and the peer reviews. But the rest of the tools are very easy to work with. And we also do all the support inside of the platform. So then here really easily, you can access the the different support articles, but then we also, and you get configuration videos but then you can also chat with our team. So the support request, go to our team rather than, to your ITS.

So we try to facilitate that process as much as Paul school and -- Oh, that was, yeah, that was awesome. Yeah. If I didn't know how to do something, I reached out to the chat or the students encouraging the the students to reach out chat, and then I was like an immediate response. They didn't have to wait for me to respond or to go through the faculty member. So That's very easy.

Like, we do have a canvas chat, and then that is also useful. The same thing with here. And so know we're out of time and everyone's hungry and wants to go to dinner. So we really appreciate you coming to join us. We'll be, at the booth.

Yeah. We'll be, back in the in the expo hall. Me and Patty will be there. Probably just having some drinks hanging out. So if you want any more details or wanna ask some more questions to Patty please do feel free to, drop by and say hello, and we'd love to, chat with you more, but thank you really for, for joining us today. Thank you very much.