We are excited to inform you of the launch of our next pilot project, in which colleges and universities will get the chance to use FeedbackFruits – a platform that uses AI to improve students’ academic and professional writing styles by automating feedback on structural elements like citation, academic style, grammar, and structure, leaving teachers with more time to focus on higher-order cognitive skills like comprehension and critical argumentation of concepts. The pilot will run between January and May 2024.
We are now encouraging expressions of interest from both colleges and universities, so if this opportunity sounds appealing, please read the information below to find out more about the project and the process for selecting participants. The deadline for submitting expressions of interest is close of play, Friday 12th January 2024. We will not be able to consider expressions of interest received after that date.
Pilot timetable
| What | When | Institution responsibilities | Jisc responsibilities |
| Kicking off the pilot | January 2024 | Attend introduction meeting (45 minutes)
Attend training session on how to use the platform (45 minutes) Complete technical set-up of the platform
|
Ogranise introductory and training sessions
Ensure participants have the skills they need proceed with the pilot
|
| Using the platform | February – April 2024 | Use FeedbackFruits with students
Attend fortnightly catch-up sessions (30 minutes) |
Attend fortnightly catch-up sessions (30 minutes)
Be available for and provide support as needed |
| Evaluating the pilot | April – May 2024 | Help distribute surveys
Help organise focus groups with staff and students
|
Conduct focus groups with staff and students, and create surveys.
Evaluate the pilot based on available insights, and write up an evaluation report. |
Expected Workload
As part of the pilot, we ask that participating institutions commit to the following:
Institutions will appoint three to four pilot champions who:
- Will drive the deployment of the platform in their institution
- Is involved in learning design – either as a teacher, lecturer, educational technologist, course designers or otherwise
- Will attend the kick-off meeting and training sessions
- Will set up learning activities via the FeedbackFruits platform (which is expected to take 5-10 minutes – the first couple of times are likely to take 30 – 45 minutes due to time needed to learn a new platform)
Institutions will commit the necessary technical staff to:
- Integrate with your VLE (Blackboard, Canvas, Brightspace, Moodle or Teams) as per this documentation, with support from FeedbackFruits. We appreciate this will be subject to internal change processes and review, so agreement is ‘in principle’ at this stage.
- Your IT team/VLE administrator will be able to set up a meeting with Feedback Fruits’ operations specialist to run through the integration steps together, which typically takes 20 minutes for both LTI and API (integration on both levels would be a pre-requisite).
- (Feedback Fruits can also be integrated with Turnitin if the institution has the necessary licenses in place).
The ideal participants
All of Jisc’s member colleges and universities are welcome to put themselves forward for the pilot.
We are anticipating a large number of expressions of interest, so we’ll use the following criteria to select participants.
In this section we’ll detail key attributes of ideal participants.
Course type
- We’re particularly keen on participants using FeedbackFruits for subject areas where student work tends to be essay based and requires a high volume of feedback, and where student numbers are large.
Teaching and learning ethos
- One of FeedbackFruits’ core aims is to help students become more autonomous learners as they iteratively improve their work (and their underlying skills) through automated feedback.
- As such, ideal participants will have a strong commitment to independent learning and learning through feedback.
Further information
FeedbackFruits will help you tailor the tool implementation in a way that best supports your intentions and institutional goals.
Here are some examples of teaching and learning goals that FeedbackFruits has helped other institutions support:
- Fostering Universal Design for Learning: Scaling personalised feedback for all students to enhance their understanding and engagement
- Self-regulated and personalised learning: Improve student independence in their learning process whilst providing them with the opportunity to receive personalised feedback
- Iterative assessment: Leveraging multiple assessment points and providing regular feedback to students in a scalable and time efficient manner.
Expressing Interest
If you are interested in participating, could you please complete this form before the close of play on 12th January 2024 to express your interest.
If you have any further questions for us, please email ncai@jisc.ac.uk.
Find out more by visiting our Artificial Intelligence page to view publications and resources, join us for events and discover what AI has to offer through our range of interactive online demos.
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Get in touch with the team directly at AI@jisc.ac.uk
