We recently made some quality-of-life improvements and also added a feature to make it easier for teachers to review struggling questions with their students. You can read all about these changes in our latest community update!

We recently added 2 new features:

1. For teachers who are about to start a new school year: the ability to create a new course that has questions and assignments from a previous course.

2. Free response required keywords: you can now add keywords that students must include in their free response answers in order to get the question correct:

We recently improved the Personal Deck Freeze system! You can read all about the updates here: https://community.podsie.org/posts/242021-updates-personal-deck-freeze-improvements

We recently added the folowing features:

- New types of student email notifications

- The ability to prevent students from changing their names

We also fixed a bug that prevented student's personal deck streak from counting past 93 days.

You can read more details in our community update post!

You can now add student answers as an acceptable answer for free response questions:

For example, let's say that the exemplar answer to a free response question was "they are similar", but the student put "exactly the same" as the free response answer and then marked that they got the question correct. In this case, this free response would likely be flagged for review because the student answer is a bit different than the exemplar. 

If you mark that 'Answer is Acceptable', then "exactly the same" would be added as an acceptable answer that would no longer be flagged in the future for review. These "acceptable answers" are not visible to students, and they will continue only seeing your exemplar answer.

Previously on Podsie, short answer question answers were limited to a single word, and the student was required to type in the answer exactly. We've introduced typo detection and this changes two things: 1) if a student types in an answer that's close (close is defined by our typo detection algorithm) to the correct answer, we show the prompt in the screenshot below and give them one additional attempt to answer the question 2) short answer question responses are no longer limited to a single word, so you can have spaces, and instead, now they are limited to a maximum length of 40 characters.

Typo detection is not enabled for short answer questions that have numeric answers or for short answer questions that have answers less than 3 characters.

We've gotten feedback that freezing the personal deck is confusing, so we've updated the flow.

When you freeze a class' personal deck in the Settings page, the Class page now has a badge that indicates that the personal decks are frozen, and the Personal Deck Cards Due column will show as N/A.

In the Personal Deck tab of the class, the data over time view will show that 0 questions are due for the dates you have personal deck frozen.

Lastly, in the Settings page, there is now a progress bar when you unfreeze the personal deck.

1. We've cut down on the number of clicks it takes to handle a Flagged Response in Notifications.

2. We added the ability to clone an assignment. You can use this to quickly set up a new assignment that has all of the same questions that an existing assignment has:

We added a new feature for multiple choice and short answer questions. Previously, when students missed these kinds of questions, the correct answer would pop up for them right away. Some teachers on Podsie shared that for certain questions, they'd prefer if students did not see the correct answer right away, and instead were encouraged to engage with the 'Deeper Learning' more first in order to deduce the answer.

To do facilitate this, we've added a new field to the question creation form called Number of Attempts until Answer Shown:

By default, this field is set to "1", which means the answer will still show right away (since the student will have attempted the question once). If you want students to take a couple more attempts before the correct answer shows, then you can set it to a value higher than 1.

If you do that, then you are required to provide a deeper learning.

On the student side, this is what they'll see for questions that don't show the correct answer right away:

We added a new field to assignments that allows you to control when the assignment will become available to students:

You can leave this field blank if you'd like for the assignment to launch to your students right away.

Please note that for Personal Deck Assignments, the questions won't be pulled from students' personal decks into the Personal Deck Assignment until the Launch At time has passed.