Presenting our completely new interface for students
Today we are very happy to present our new interface for students at Peergrade. The new interface has been long underway and we have been discussing, drawing, coding and testing for the last couple of months.
Together with the new student interface we are also ready to show off our new revamped visual identity for the Peergrade.io platform. The old interface was designed by programmers, and looked thereafter. It was time for a change.
The new course overview
The old interface was very long and users had to scroll a lot to get an overview of things. In the new interface we have decided to go with two columns of assignments that each have a fixed height — to keep users from having to scroll as much as possible.
On each assignment you can see the title, the description, which state it is in and the upcoming deadlines. On an assignment is three buttons, one for uploading/changing/viewing your hand-in for the assignment, one for providing feedback to others (or viewing it when you are done) and one for seeing your own received feedback.
The new interface for uploading files
On the new hand-in page we have allowed students to drag-and-drop files for upload, and we now show a nice big progress bar to indicate the progress on the file-upload. You can choose your group if you are handing in together with other students, and we have made it easy to use the same group as used for a previous hand-in.
If students choose “As group” when handing in, then they can’t submit before choosing at least one other group member. If students wish to submit alone, they have to click “As individual”. We hope this will reduce the number of students who forget to add their group members when handing in.
The new interface for giving feedback
In the new interface for giving feedback we use the sidebar to help track the progress of giving feedback. This helps the student get a clear view of how many peers they still need to give feedback to, and which questions in the evaluation rubric they have completed.
In the new interface, we have decided to require students to finish giving feedback to one peer before continuing with the next. We hope this will help students to get more feedback since it will allow the system to distribute feedback-givers more fairly.
We have also added an auto-save functionality to the system so you never lose the feedback you are in the process of giving.
The new interface for seeing received feedback
In the interface for seeing feedback it was also previously required to scroll far to see all feedback. In the new interface we have decided to use the sidebar to help students quickly navigate between peers when reading feedback.
In the future (soon, we promise) we will include a way to see the feedback per-question instead of per-grader.
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