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Status on the New Marking Tool - May 2024

Following our article on the New Marking Tool and its usability after the February 2024 release, we wanted to provide you with an update on the latest status as well as future improvements. 

Since the February release 2024, the marking tool has been out of its beta status and the majority of marking processes are being supported by the new tool. New functionalities and improvements have and will be continuously added over the coming months. The new marking tool can be enabled as the licence wide default tool for any newly created flows. Reach out to our Customer Support to request that this be set up on your licence.

The new marking tool can now be used on all available flow types as the March release 2024 brought along the ability to add annotations on FLOWmulti flows. Developments coming with the May and June releases are bringing the new marking tool even more in line with the existing tool.

In which cases should the established marking tool still be used?

While all flow types can be marked using the full functionality of the new marking tool (e.g. making annotations, submission and cohort comments, bulk edit annotations, add grade justifications, mark using rubrics, enter and finalise grades), there are a few situations were we would currently recommend the use of the established "old" marking tool: 

  • Flows that are assessed using rubric-based marking as an advanced marking workflow. 
  • When FLOWmulti submissions need to be printed out. 
  • When FLOWcombine and FLOWseries are used for assessment processes.
  • If assessors want to add a grade scaler to a flow themselves.
  • When using statistics on FLOWmulti flows. The first step towards making statistics available with the New Marking Tool was made with the May release 2024. This functionality will be expanded over the coming releases and will provide assessors with a powerful tool to gain insight into the distribution of scores both from a cohort perspective and on a submission level.

In future releases, functionality will become available that will also support these use cases. We will give another update on the status of the new marking tool and the progression to support these marking processes in the summer. 

What functionality will no longer be available in the new marking tool?

The new marking tool has been carefully developed to provide assessors and reviewers with an optimised and improved marking journey. Marking across flow types should be unified to create a more homogenous experience and give assessors a continuous overview of the marking progress and produced output. The aim is for the new marking tool to provide a rich, standardised and intuitive way of providing participants with assessment feedback.   

To achieve this objective, certain functionality from the current marking tool is currently not planned to be supported in the new marking tool: 

  • To award individual points on FLOWassign or FLOWlock flows. Rubrics can be used to ensure a more standardised feedback process.
  • Using grade scalers on FLOWassign and FLOWlock flows. Rubrics can be used, ensuring a standardised feedback process and allowing for automatic point conversion into final grades.
  • Awarding manual points on auto-scored question types on FLOWmulti flows. It is possible for authors to deactivate auto-scoring on a question level during the setup of the assignment.
  • Award unlimited points on FLOWmulti questions. This ensures participants cannot receive more than the maximum points originally defined by the author during the assignment setup.
  • Using personal rubrics. Managers can add rubrics to flows to support the centralised handling of rubrics.
  • The summary view has been replaced by the ability to show or hide comments or annotations shared by co-assessors. Assessors can now easily display comments and annotations from others directly within the marking tool rather than having to move to a separate page. 
  • Printing FLOWmulti submissions will be replaced by the ability to download FLOWmulti items.
  • Static version of a demo flow for assessors. This may be replaced with in-app demo flows.

When do I need to switch over to the new marking tool?

We are aware that our customers need time to plan the switch and implement the new marking tool. We will consider this when a deprecation plan is created for the existing tool. We want to ensure the quality of the new marking tool and make sure that all features have been released to cover the full marking journey before we start to deprecate the old tool. We will provide regular updates in the coming months and will share an official deprecation plan well in advance.