Minor Release April 2022

The minor release on 22 April 2022 will bring enhancements to the feedback possibilities in WISEflow in the form of distractor rationale. The article below contains more information about the features that come with this release as well as links to articles in the Service Center which explain the functionalities in more detail. 

 Authoring

Marking

Adjustment and Improvements

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Lockdown Browser Versions

This minor release does not include a new version of the lockdown browser.

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Authoring

Distractor Rationale

In order to better support individualised and enriched feedback possibilities for students taking multiple-choice style assessments, it will now be possible to set pre-defined explanations at the individual answer option level. During authorship of an item, question-setters can provide a rationale for the correct option, as well as for each individual distractor option, with feedback then presented to students tailored to the response they have selected.

Feedback can be provided to students either in real-time during the course of the assessment (by making use of the existing "allow the participant to verify the answer to the question" option) or once the marking period has finished and results are released.

The distractor rationale feature is available on the following question types:

• Multiple choice - block layout
• Multiple responses
• Standard MCQ
• Fill in text with drag and drop
• Fill in text with drop-down
• Fill in text
  

You can read through these articles for more information on distractor rationale and how it can be set up by authors (details provided under "More Options").

Relation to Content Bank When Adding Items to an Assignment

When an assignment author uses an item from the content bank in their test, that relationship between the item in the test and the item in the content bank is maintained by default. This allows for dynamic updates and to ensure that all instances of the item are the most recently updated version. Whilst this brings many benefits, there are also situations where users may want to decouple their assignment version of the item from the content bank version, so that locally-made changes in the test are not then pushed out to all instances of the item.

Whilst it is already possible to retroactively remove the relations at the test-level, we have now made this choice much more intuitive and at the point of authorship.

From now on, when authors choose to add items from the content bank, they will be presented with the option to decide whether:

1. The relation to the content bank is maintained and any edits to the item in the test context will affect the item everywhere it is used.
   • In addition, it is possible to decide whether or not author group(s) from the assignment level should be inherited to the item. That will allow these author groups to edit questions in that item and everywhere it is used.
2. A copy of the item is created that is local to the test. This means the relationship with the content bank is removed and that any changes to the item in the test context are not pushed back to the content bank.

The article Creating an Interactive Online Test (FLOWmulti Assignment) explains the use of items in an assignment in more detail.

Improvements to the User Interface of the Authoring Tool

The minor release will bring some improvements to the user interface of the Author tool. For example, new buttons will make it possible to directly create new assignments or content bank items from the overview page of the Authoring tab.

Coloured icons and lines (green for assignments and blue for the content bank ) will visually distinguish whether one is working in the assignment area or content bank area. 

Additionally, the author group icon will show the full name of the author group that has been added. If more than one author group have been added, a number indicate how many additional author groups are attached to an assignment or item. Hovering over the icon will show the names of all author groups.

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Marking

Improvements to Grade Justifications

In some jurisdictions, it is a formal requirement that assessors are required to provide additional feedback to students, on request, to help justify a grading outcome. This is handled by WISEflow’s Grade Justification (formerly Explanation request) tool, which has now been enhanced to enable assessors to provide this justification without it first being requested by a participant. It will now be possible for the justification to be submitted proactively as a part of the grade submission process.

Technical improvements:
A webhook will trigger either when a participant has requested a grade justification or when an assessor has submitted a new response to a justification request. Three new API endpoints will enable you to fetch all grade justifications on a flow, fetch only a single one or ask for a new grade justification as a participant.

The article Grade Justification Requests and Re-markings will go into more detail on the use of grade justification requests.

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Adjustment and Improvements

API Enhancements

To improve security, we have implemented the 0Auth 2 standard. Licence administrators can now generate API tokens and 0Auth clients. You can read through our Service Center article on the WISEflow API for more details on how to generate 0Auth credentials or the article on generating a bearer token using the API.