Changelog

In order to make online discussions thrive, it is often necessary to scaffold the learning experience for students. Maybe you want to have them post their own topic and comment on other topics, before they can go on to the next activity. Or maybe it's enough to just leave a comment on a topic to move on in the course.

Today we've launched discussion completion rules that makes it possible to specify requirements for a discussion activity. With this addition to the discussion activity, you can control how many topics and comments a student needs to do in order to complete the discussion activity.

How it works

Simply go to your discussion activity and scroll to the 'Rules' section in your discussion activity settings and specify your requirements for student completion.

Learn more about discussions in Eduflow

To learn more about how our discussion activity works, you can visit this page: https://www.eduflow.com/discussion-activity

And if you wish to learn more about how to write good discussion questions, you can read our blog post here:

[https://www.eduflow.com/blog/how-to-write-discussion-questions-that-actually-spark-discussions](https://www.eduflow.com/blog/how-to-write-discussion-questions-that-actually-spark-discussions?utm_source=canny&utm_medium=changelogpost&utm_campaign=changelogpost)

There's a lot to learn from the data generated in your courses, that can help you improve your learning experience. Who's doing well on your assignments? Which students need help improving their feedback skills? Who's the student that left the most comments in your discussions?

Today we're happy to announce our new Summary page that includes three different views:

Progress:

the familiar progress view that gives you an overview of all your students and activities.

Scores:

shows how your students have performed on activities that generate a score. For example, if you have a peer review flow, you will end up with two scores; 1) a submission quality score that averages all peer reviews to a submission and outputs a percentage score. 2) A review quality score that averages all feedback reflections to a student and outputs a percentage score. All review activities – peer review, self review, instructor review and feedback reflections – will be able to generate scores.

Metadata:

shows information on your activities about how students have interacted with them. Here, you'll be able to see how many words students have written in their submission, reviews and reflections, the file sizes of their uploaded work, how many topics each student have created, etc.

We're really excited about this feature, but this is only the beginning for our new Summary page. We will keep improving on it by adding more data outputs, allow table customisations and add export functionality. Say tuned for more updates!

We've always believed that student collaboration is an important element when you want to create an effective learning experience. Today we're introducing the discussion activity so you can start leveraging the hive mind of all your course participants!

How it works

To add a discussion activity, simply go to your course, click the blue 'Add activities & flows' button and find the discussion activity in the list. Like with all other activities, you can add as many as you want, give it a description, set up prerequisites and add deadlines.

When you add a discussion activity to your course, students get the option to post and reply to topics. Once a student has either posted a topic or left a reply, the activity will get marked as complete. This way, students will be motivated to actively participate in discussions!

Combine discussion activities with tags

To create a comfortable space for students to interact with each other, smaller groups create a safer environment in a vulnerable learning process. With the discussion activity, you can separate students into smaller discussion groups by combining it with our 'tags' feature.

1. Add a 'select a tag' activity where students select a tag for themselves, or tag them yourself in the 'Participants' page.
2. Add a discussion activity.
3. Go the the activity settings and enable 'Separate discussions by tags'
4. That's it! Now students will only be able to see discussion topics made by other students with corresponding tags.

If you wish to learn more about the discussion activity and explore course templates that's using discussion activities in interesting ways, visit https://www.eduflow.com/discussion-activity for more info!

Courses can quickly become hard to navigate if they have more than just one or two flows. To keep things nice and organised we've improved the course sidebar to include collapsable flows!

🏷Today we are launching filtering by tags for the instructor review activity in Eduflow. The new filtering feature lets instructors easily find students based on their tags. 🔎In addition to filtering by tags, instructors will now also be able to search for students in the instructor review activity.

How it works:

• Navigate to the instructor review activity
• Select the filters button to open the filter menu
• Select tags and the menu and decide on your filters

Fear of the blank page is not just a problem for fiction writers, but for instructors as well. It's never easy to start building out your course from scratch, which is why we've created a new course template gallery to help you on your way!

How to use course templates

1. Clicking on the Create or join button, you now have a new option to browse our template gallery. You can use the categories in the left side to filter our templates.
2. Select a template to learn more about how it works and what activities it includes.
3. When you've found a template you want to use, you simply click on 'Use this template' and the template will be copied to your account. Now you can start modifying it to your own needs!

Share your own templates

Wait, hold up, there's more! You can also share your own courses as templates now. That way, you can share courses with your colleagues that they can copy to their own account. Here's how to do it:

1. Go to the course you want to share as a template.
2. Go to the 'Participants' page.
3. Change the course link from private to Public course page.
4. Click on Public course settings
5. Tick off the checkbox to 'allow other instructors to duplicate course' and save changes.
6. Copy the course link and share it with your colleagues. In the header, they can click on "Use this template" and it will be copied to their account!

Eduflow provides instructors with an overview of all submissions, reviews and reflections in a course in the Results Interface. Until now, instructors have been able to delete submissions from there, but with this latest addition to Eduflow, deletion of reviews and reflections is now also supported.

Simply navigate to the review or reflection that you would like to delete and click on the three dots in the top right corner. From there, you are able to delete the review or reflection.

This feature is now available to you and all instructors using Eduflow. We hope you'll make good use of it! 😊

How it works

• Go to any activity that contains submission, review of reflections
• Click on 'View submissions/reviews/reflections'
• Navigate to the submission, review or reflection you would like to delete by using the sidebar
• Click on the button with three dots in the top right corner of the submission, review or reflection that you would like to delete and click on 'Delete submission/review/reflection'

Today we are launching tags on Eduflow ✨. The new tags feature lets instructors create tags that can be assigned to students. Tags can from day one be used in the peer review activity to setup custom allocation, but the possibilities with tags are almost limitless and we expect this feature to grow even further over time.

👉Here is an overview of the new tag features available on Eduflow:

• A tag overview is now available in the participants page where tags can be created as well as assigned to students by instructors
• New custom allocation rule settings based on tags are now available in the peer review activity
• A new select a tag activity is now available that lets students select from a range of tags created by the instructor

👩‍🏫Tag overview on the participants page

Instructors are able to create and assign tags to students on the participants page. Simply hover the student in the table to get the option to add tags or use the bulk editing mode to easily assign tags to a number of students at the same time.

📐Peer review allocation rules by tags

Instructors are able to use the tags to set up custom allocation rules in the peer review activity. For instance, the instructor can set up rules that only or don't let students review others with the same tag. Custom allocation rules can be combined, which lets the instructor set up customer allocation rules based on their needs.

👩‍🎓Select a tag activity

The new select a tag activity lets instructors create and set up a range of tags that the students can select between. Instructors are able to let students select one or multiple tags in each select a tag activity. The tags that students select will be added to the students' user profile in the course and will be available in the student overview on the participants page.

All of this – plus the never-ending possibilities of combining the new tags features with any of our existing activities – is now available to you and all instructors using Eduflow. We hope you'll make good use of it! 😊

Instructors are now able to replace a rubric from any existing peer review, instructor review, self-review or feedback reflection activity into another activity supporting rubrics.

We hope you'll be happy with this latest addition to Eduflow 😊✨

How it works:

1. Navigate to the settings of the activity where you would like to replace the rubric
2. Find the rubric section and activate the button: 'Edit rubric'
3. Find the 'Replace rubric' button in the top right corner and activate it
4. Navigate to the course in the menu and find the activity where you would like to copy the rubric from

Speed up your workflow with our newest feature addition to the course sidebar – duplicate flows and activities!

Opening up the context menu for any flow or course now gives you the option to duplicate it. This should make your workflow a lot faster if you have repetitive flows and activities throughout your course.

Happy cloning! 👯‍♂️

Sometimes, you want to build out your content before publishing an activity to your course. Some activities, like the instructor review activity, aren't even necessary for students to see. That's why we've made it possible to hide activities from students so they will not appear in their course view.

How it works

1. Go the activity settings for the activity you want to hide.
2. Scroll down to the 'Rules' section.
3. Enable 'Hide activity from students'.
4. The activity is now hidden from students! In the sidebar, there's a visual cue showing what activities that are not visible to students.

Ever wanted to share a video lecture or a screencast with your students? Or maybe you've been to the film studio to record the next contender for an Oscar 🎥? Either way, you are now able to easily share any video with students with the new video activity on Eduflow!

Simply add the video activity into any new or existing course on Eduflow. You are able to upload a video from your own device or link to a video from either YouTube or Vimeo.

To make it easy for your students, we have made sure they will never forget where they left off by remembering how much of the video they have seen. In addition, the video activity is automatically marked as complete once the student has finished watching the video.

All of this – plus the never-ending possibilities of combining the new video activity with any of our existing activities – is now available to you and all instructors using Eduflow. We hope you'll make good use of it! 😊

How to set up a video activity:

• Go to one of your existing courses or create a new one in Eduflow
• Find the video activity and click it
• Click on 'Add activity' in the top right corner of the modal that appears
• Upload a video or add a link to YouTube or Vimeo

In an ideal world, all your students would complete their work on time, but in reality, that's rarely the case. That's why we've now made it possible to individualise activity settings for students!

How it works

If a student didn't submit their work before a deadline simply go to the Progress page in your course and click on a cell in the table. From the slide-in, you can change or remove deadlines and prerequisites for the selected student. A small ⚡️-icon will show up inside the cell indicating that the settings for the student have been changed. With this new and powerful feature, you're able to individualise course requirements for all your students!

But wait! There will be more

This is only the beginning of the improvements we will be making for the Progress page. We want to make this page the central hub for all the data generated in your course. Moving forward we will be working on adding:

• Search
• More settings to control for an individual student
• Bulk editing of activity settings for multiple students
• New data views that will allow you to see more data than just completion states
• Performance improvements
• Data export

Let us know what you think of this new update by shooting us an email or tweeting at us!

If you are using Eduflow together with a Learning Management System (LMS) like Canvas, Blackboard, itsLearning, Brightspace, Intellum, Sakai or something else, then you now have the option to send scores back to the LMS gradebook from Eduflow.

We built this functionality as an Eduflow activity. On the "Grade passback" activity you can choose what you want to send back to the LMS. Then whenever that thing changes for a student, we will automatically (automagically?) send it immediately.

Right now we only support sending back completion states of the other activities, but we will be adding support for other things soon!

You would properly think that the exercise of letting students review their own work would seem quite counterintuitive... How would they be able to learn anything from reviewing the work they just did themselves? But research* actually shows that asking students to review their own work is very beneficial for learning.

Now you have the opportunity to let your students benefit from this with the new self review activity on Eduflow 🚀

Simply add the self review activity into any new or existing flow. To make it easy for you to get started with using self review we've created two pre-made flows for you. The self review flow combines a submission activity with the self review activity, while the peer and self review flow combines the power of peer review and self review into one pre-made flow.

All of this – plus the never-ending possibilities of combining the new self-review activity with any of our existing activities – is now available to you and all instructors using Eduflow. We hope you'll make good use of it! 😊

* Sadler, Philip M., and Eddie Good. "The impact of self-and peer-grading on student learning." Educational assessment 11.1 (2006): 1-31.

How to set up a self review or peer and self review flow:

• Go to one of your existing courses or create a new one in Eduflow
• Click on the 'Add activities and flows' button in the bottom left corner
• Scroll down to find the 'self review flow' or 'peer and self review flow
• Click on 'Add flow' in the top right corner of the modal that appears

How to set up a self review activity:

• Go to one of your existing courses or create a new one in Eduflow
• Toggle on 'Show advanced activities & flows' in the top right corner
• Find the 'Self review'
• Click on 'Add activity' in the top right corner of the modal that appears

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Sometimes you want to hide information from activities and only reveal it once students have gotten to a certain point in your course. Now you can hide the activity description along with the uploaded resources on an activity and only show it to students once the activity is open.

How to set it up

Go to the activity settings for any activity you wish to set up this behaviour for. Scroll to the 'Rules' section and enable 'Hide content when activity is locked'. That's it!

What it looks like for students

When the setting is enabled on an activity and the activity is either locked or overdue the student will see a small text informing them that content will be displayed when they unlock the activity.

At Eduflow we love feedback and we have an idea that you do as well. That's why we're releasing one of our most requested features, the instructor review activity, where you as an instructor give feedback to students in one simple and easy to use interface!

To make it even simpler for you, we've topped this off with an instructor review flow that makes it easy to set up a submission, an instructor review and a reflection activity in one premade flow.

Now that we're at it we should not forget to mention, that we've made it possible for multiple instructors to share the task of providing instructor feedback 🤝

And yes, all of this – plus the never-ending possibilities of combining the new instructor review activity with any of our existing activities – is now available to you and all instructors using Eduflow. We hope you'll make use of it! 😊

How to set up an instructor review flow

• Go to one of your existing courses or create a new one in Eduflow
• Click on the 'Add activities and flows' button in the bottom left corner
• Scroll down to find the 'Instructor review flow' and click on it
• Click on 'Add flow' in the top right corner of the modal that appears

How to set up an instructor review activity

• Go to one of your existing courses or create a new one in Eduflow
• Toggle on 'Show advanced activities & flows' in the top right corner
• Find the 'Instructor review' and click on it
• Click on 'Add flow' in the top right corner of the modal that appears

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It's Black Friday so your email inboxes are probably booming with marketing emails selling TV's and kitchen gear for half the price. Well, now your email inbox is also going to be filled with reminders of the actions you need to take in courses you're running or enrolled in on Eduflow! Today we're releasing notifications.

In the top right corner of Eduflow you now have access to a widget showing you a list of notifications. Don't worry, if you're offline and don't see the notification inside the app, we'll send you an email about it. Never forget to reflect on received feedback ever again!

We've heard from multiple students that they want to keep peer reviewing after they've completed the required number of reviews to help out other students improve their work. We always want to make improvements that let students help each other out and make the learning process more collaborative so we've now made it possible to allow students to do additional peer reviews!

How to set it up

All you need to do to active it is to go to the peer review settings. Here, you'll find a checkbox to allow students to do additional reviews. When selected you get even more control over how many additional reviews students can make.

A special 'Thank you!' to the users that send us feedback while designing and developing this feature. Being able to co-create features with our users is amazing 🙌.

Ever felt like you were left in the dark when you couldn't see reviews and reflections done by your students? Well, now you can! 👀

We are excited about launching our new and improved results viewer for teachers. The revamped results viewer lets you dive into the results for all activities in one unified interface. This makes it possible for you to view the relationship between submissions, peer reviews and feedback reflections all at once. Combining all of this information in one interface has been an tough and interesting challenge for us, but this is only the beginning. We have plenty of features in the pipeline that will make your experience looking at students results even better. Stay tuned!

You can now generate a sharable page for your course and make it publicly available for everyone! 🎉

 Make the page interesting by adding a description and add up to three list items to draw your students' attention. The page automatically shows the course title and thumbnail along with the flows and activities in your course.

Here's a link to a live example of a public course page 👉 https://app.eduflow.com/course/tips-tricks-for-better-web-accessibility

How to set it up

1. Go to your course's 'Participants' page.
2. Click on the button next to 'Course link'.
3. Select the 'Public' option.
4. Open up the 'Public course page' settings.
5. Add your course description and benefits and click 'Save changes'
6. Share the URL on the 'Participants' page where you want!

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It is modern times and of course it should be possible to use Eduflow on your smartphone 📱. We've spend some time on optimising our user interfaces to work on smaller screens so you can access your courses even while you're on the go.

You can even add Eduflow to your homescreen on your iOS or Android device so it lives right next to your other apps! Here's an article for how to add a website to your home screen. This will create an Eduflow app icon that will open up Eduflow without any browser chrome taking up space from the screen.

Remembering email and password combinations are not something you want to waste your memory on. If you already have a Google account you can now use that to sign up and log in with. That's one less email + password combo to remember! 🎉

It would be great if one day we could agree to use the same time standard all around the world. Unfortunately that doesn't seem to happen anytime soon so that's why we've now made it possible to change your time preferences! If you go to your user settings you will now see a dropdown that lets you select between AM/PM and 24h time option.

The first time you enter Eduflow we'll do our best to detect what preference you want as your default. So for example, if you sign up up from the US we will set your preference for AM/PM. You can always go in and change this if we didn't set the right default.

If a picture is worth a thousand words and you like long novels there's a high likelihood that you'll like the newest feature addition to Eduflow – video submissions! 📽

Making videos is a great way to learn communication and presentation skills. Let students submit a webcam or screen recording directly from your submission activity. To enable the feature go to your submission activity settings and enable 'video' under formats. Happy recording!