• a problem with Eli’s WYSIWYG editor that was causing the formatting (paragraphs, bolding, italics, etc) to be stripped out of both instructor and student writing.
• a bug that was causing students who submitted their revisions to receive a blank white screen.
• a nasty PHP error for instructors when they created a revision taks with a particular configuration.

Thanks as always to all of our users who take the time to inform us when they are having difficulties. Please continue sharing your frustrations* with us through the in-app “Report Tech Issue” function, emailing us at support@elireview.com, or talk to us on Twitter or Facebook.

* and special thanks to those of you who also share your teaching victories with us!

• Extending due dates: Due dates for all tasks (writing, review, and revision) can now be changed by an instructor. Previously, a task would become “locked” once students started submitting work, preventing instructors from changing the task out from under the student, causing confusion both for students and in Eli’s database. While all other fields stay remain locked after responses start, instructors now have the option to extend the due date of their tasks.
• Bug fix: in some cases, students responding to a review would receive an error saying “Couldn’t hydrate. Found non-unique key mapping named ‘review_response_component_id’. This error has been addressed and show no longer be a problem.

Many thanks to all of our users who take the time to inform us when they are having difficulties – it’s the only way we’ll get better. Please continue sharing your frustrations with us through the in-app “Report Tech Issue” function, emailing us at support@elireview.com, or talk to us on Twitter or Facebook.

• We addressed a bug that prevented feedback left by an instructor on a revision plan from being seen by students.
• We improved navigation by making the Eli logo clickable, returning users to the Dashboard.
• We addressed a bug preventing the “Add to Revision Plan” link from showing in some instances of peer feedback.
• We fixed a mistake in our last update that caused the “Load Writing Task” option to disappear.
• We solved a use case that caused an error message to appear when a user clicks the “Redeem course code” button.

We hope everyone’s semesters are wrapping up nicely and that students are seeing progress as writers and reviewers. Thank you for your continued support and helping us continue to make Eli better.

Here’s a list of the fixes we’ve addressed in this update:

• Instructors updating their time zones in “Course Settings” to anything but Eastern time were given a PHP error. That is now resolved.
• Eli had been allowing instructors to create revision tasks with no associated work (either a revision plan or a revise and resubmit task). This has been addressed – instructors can now create revision tasks with one or the other or both, but not none.
• The last update solved a problem where revision tasks couldn’t be deleted, but that raised a new problem where instructors couldn’t create a new revision task for writing task where a revision had already been deleted. That has now been solved.
• When students begin a revision task, the original writing will now be automatically loaded into the WYSIWYG composing space (assuming the revision is for a writing task that was composed in Eli).
• In the comprehensive revision report, instructors will now be able to access all reviews of a writing task, putting all artifacts of the write-review-revise cycle in one, easy-to-access place.
• In the “Student as a Reviewer” report, the average number of comments made by the class was reported as a total, not an average. This has been fixed.
• Likewise, an error caused the “Average Rating of Comments” to be reported inaccurately across the “Responses to Writing” and “Student as a Reviewer” reports. This has been addressed.
• Legacy users who signed up without an email addresses were directed to an old, deprecated version of the “edit settings” page that resulted in PHP errors. Legacy users are now redirected to the new “Account Settings” interface.
• The text of the “Join a Course” box on the student homepage was updated to reduce confusion about course codes vs. subscription codes and does a better job of steering users to the appropriate space.
• A bug caused the helpfulness rating a student assigned to a piece of feedback to be locked to changes without a page refresh. Students should now be able to rate their feedback and change their ratings as needed.
• Fixed a bug that caused name misalignments on the “Add to Revision Plan” interface. Before, a piece of feedback added by a writer was labeled as though it had been given by the writer and not the reviewer.
• Students will no longer be required to give responses to classmates who did not submit a writing task. If they were assigned to review a classmate who did not submit, they will not see that student’s name.
• Users who currently have a subscription but who attempt to redeem a subscription code that doesn’t actually extend their subscription will be given a useful error message and the code will not be redeemed.
• Review groups with large numbers of students will now have links to the students for them to review displayed consistently, rather than a mix of tabs and bubbles.
• Revision plans will now be locked to changes after a student submits the actual revision to a piece of writing. This prevents revision plans from being edited after the revisions to a writing task have been completed (instructors can always create a revision task for the revision if needed). This will also allow students to view their revision plans at a later time, but they will be locked to edits.
• Last, but perhaps most important – the “allow late submissions” option has been removed from writing tasks. Locking writing tasks to student submissions after the due date has been observed to cause serious consequences for students. Missing the first step in our new task sequence (write -> review -> revise) causes serious problems for students who miss the writing task, preventing them from participating in later tasks, with no way for the instructor to allow an override. Now, students will be able to submit a writing task all the way up the due date of the revision. The instructor will be notified when a writing task has been submitted late and how late it is so that they may assess the student accordingly, but the student will still be able to submit and participate in later tasks.

A long list of problems and annoyances addressed in just a week! As always, we’re listening to you, either at our support email address, on Twitter and on Facebook. Happy reviewing!

This week’s release fixes the following bugs:

• A bug that returned a nasty error message to students joining a class that had exactly one task already created (not zero tasks, and not two or more tasks, but exactly one ).
• A bug that caused a revision task to show twice on the instructor’s “Tasks and Reports” list.
• A “division by zero” error caused when an instructor saves a revision task as a draft.
• A bug that caused some new writing tasks not to show up in the “Tasks and Reports” list.
• A bug that produced a PHP error on the “Create an Account” interface when the user clicked in the “username” box and clicked out of it without entering anything.
• A bug that caused review feedback with a 5-star helpfulness rating to display 10 stars (sorry, reviewers, no extra helpfulness for you!)
• A fairly serious bug that made it impossible to edit, delete, or assign a revision task saved as a draft in some circumstances.
• Removed a vestigial “edit account settings” interface made obsolete by the new, awesome version and put a proper 404 redirect in place.

Please let us know if you encounter any problems using Eli. You can do this by going to Help -> Report Tech Issue while logged in to Eli, by emailing us at support@msu.edu, mentioning @elireview on Twitter, or posting to our Facebook Wall. We’re always listening!

In the wake of last Friday’s major release, in which we debuted our new Revision features, several bugs made it out into the wild. This week’s update addresses four of the new bugs identified as the biggest problems for users:

• Date and time issues: a relatively small mistake caused a serious error that affected all of the date-selection options throughout Eli. This caused short start and end dates for courses, due dates for tasks to be short, and tasks closing for students well before their due dates. This problem should be resolved now and all dates should function as you’d expect.
• Making changes to saved reviews: many users reported error messages when trying to edit, assign, or delete reviews that had been saved as drafts. This problem should be resolved and all reviews should be editable and assigned as expected.
• Deleting reviews: a bug caused an endless “Do you want to delete this review?” loop to occur when a user tried to delete a review. Reviews should now delete as expected.
• Loading saved reviews: some types of reviews caused ugly error messages when users tried to load them in the “Load Review” interface. This bug has been eliminated.
• Student review reports: an oversight caused links to review reports to not show up after a student completed a review, making it impossible for students to access their review results. This too has been solved.
• Portfolio views: a bug in both the student and instructor portfolio view caused tasks that had been deleted to be visible on these displays. That bug has been removed and deleted tasks should no longer be shown.
• Students saving feedback: students doing a review would see a PHP error if they used the “Save Feedback” button. That should no longer happen.

We move as fast as we can to resolve bugs when we become aware of them. If you find bugs in Eli, please let us know. You can do this in several ways:

• Report the bug in Eli by going to Help -> Report Tech Issue. This will go directly to our developers and will capture all relevant data about your problem.
• Email us at support@elireview.com
• @mention us on Twitter
• Post on our Facebook wall

We’re always listening for your feedback. Happy reviewing!

New Feature: Goodbye Assignments, Hello Writing Tasks

Since the first major release of Eli, the “Assignment” was one of the system’s primary metaphors. The idea behind this choice was that offline assignments are often comprised of multiple pieces – with an essay, for example, an instructor might ask students to compose a thesis statement, followed by an outline, followed by a draft, followed by a revision. All of those things were considered deliverables (or “documents” or “writing products”) of the assignment – an assignment was a container for many potential pieces of writing.

This was confusing for some students and teachers, though. You wanted a more streamlined approach.We listened! Now, the work students do in Eli comes down to three things:: writing tasks, review tasks, and revision tasks. We’re very happy to permanently replace the “Assignment” with the “Writing Task,” a much simpler interface.

The Writing Task feature replaces the Assignment. Simplicity FTW.

New Feature: Revision Tasks

We alluded to the rollout of this new type of Eli activity with our previous big update, and you could see where we were going with the release of the revision plan feature, but now they’re officially here!

Instructors can create Revision Tasks for their students, completing the Write – Review – Revise cycle that forms the backbone of most
writing instruction.

Instructors can now create tasks that ask students to revise their writing. Revision taks include creating a plan for revision and revising and resubmitting.

Here are the highlights of how revision works in Eli:

• Teachers ask students to do two types of revision tasks: 1) make revision plans and 2) revise and resubmit a piece of writing. Each type can be added at different times, so you can add a “revise and resubmit” task after students have completed a revision plan, but not vice versa (because yeah, planning a revision after you’ve written it makes no sense).
• Students can make a revision plan without instructors assigning one. If an instructor does assign a revision plan, students complete it and then can elect to share it with the instructor.
• Teachers can leave feedback on the revision plan for a student to encourage any necessary changes before revising begins.
• Revise and resubmit tasks work exactly like writing tasks, but when students submit revisions, Eli records the revision as a new version of the original, making it easy to compare before and after.
• Eli generates a Revision Report for each student that gathers all of the products of the writing process in one place:
  • The original writing task
  • Any reviews done of that writing
  • The student’s revision plan
  • The revision of the original writing

The Revision Report gathers all of the artifacts of the writing process in one place, making it easy to see how a student got from point A to point B.

We’ll have a couple more revision features coming in the near future, but for now, we’re eager to get these into your hands and see how you’ll use them.

New Feature: Student Portfolios

Folks have been asking for this feature for a long time and we’re happy to finally deliver. Our new Portfolio features will generate two different types of displays:

• Student Portfolio – all users will have a student portfolio view that will collect all tasks (writing, review, and revision) they’ve ever done in Eli, across all of their courses. The portfolio gathers these in one place to make it easy to access everything. Users can access their portfolios by clicking their name in the upper right corner and selecting “Portfolio.”
• Instructor’s Student Portfolio – instructors now have access to a course portfolio of each of their students. Unlike the Student Portfolio, the Course Portfolio collects all of the writing a student has done in that specific course, giving the instructor a history view of that student but not allowing them to see across all of that student’s courses.

Being able to see writing, review, and revision task history across a single course or across an entire writing career should give both writers and teachers a distinct understanding of their performance.

New Feature: Course Settings

Instructors can use the new Course Settings feature to update information about their courses and add co-instructors.

A feature specifically requested by instructors is the ability to manage your course settings. Users will no longer have to contact support to fix misspellings in the titles of their courses! You can access the Course Settings from anywhere inside your course, and you’ll be able to:

• Update the title and section number of your course
• Adjust the start and end dates of the course
• Add co-instructors by either their username or an email address

Adding co-instructors is a particularly powerful new feature. As co-instructors, they can create new tasks in your course, but they’ll also be able to re-use your tasks in their own courses.

Bug Fixes

As always, we do a little housekeeping with each release, but this week there was only one: we fixed a bug that caused weird date range issues – courses could only last two weeks, assignments would come due at strange times, etc.

Eli's new revision plan feature allows writers to add a piece of feedback to a revision plan, use select portions of that feedback as needed, and add notes.

New Features

• Revision Plans: Eli takes a big step forward today with the release of our first revision feature. You can read more about revision and what’s ahead and specifically about how to use revision plans in the classroom today, but here’s a quick recap of features:
• writers add individual pieces of feedback they receive from reviewers to a revision plan
• writers can sort selected feedback according to priority
• writers can edit the feedback they’ve added and add additional notes
• writers can print their revision plans to use while revising or to share with instructors
• Account Settings - a refreshed interface makes it much easier to manage account settings. Users have always been able to update their email address, but now they can change all settings of their accounts.

A new Account Settings interfaces gives users more controls over the Eli accounts.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed a bug that kept instructions for individual writing tasks from being displayed
• Fixed a bug where writers were not taken right to their review reports after completing a review
• Fixed a bug where reviewers were shown an error message when an assigned reviewee had not completed the writing task
• Resolved a display issue in which students with long names caused line breaks that were difficult to read

What does the revision plan do?

The revision plan gives writers an easy way to pick and choose from the feedback they receive during a review and develop it into a strategy for revising their writing. Writers can add feedback they’ve received on any review to their plan, or they can build a plan from scratch without using any reviewer feedback.

For instructors, the revision plan offers insight into whether or not students have developed an effective strategy for moving forward with a revision. If a student hasn’t developed their plan substantially, or has failed to utilize key feedback from their reviewers, instructors can see that in the student’s revision plan and can make a decision about whether or not to intervene. Instructors can also compare the revision plan against the revised text to evaluate how the writer did or did not follow through on their revisions.

How does the revision plan work?

In a writer’s review report, accessible after they complete a review, they’ll see a list of feedback they’ve received from their classmates. In addition to being able to rate each piece of feedback for perceived helpfulness, writers can click the “Add to Revision Strategy” link.

Each piece of feedback a writer receives from a review now has an "Add to Revision Plan" option.

They’ll be presented with a window that gives them some choices. They’ll be asked to indicate which revision plan they’d like to add that feedback to, with the writing task that feedback was related to selected by default. They’ll then have the option to edit the feedback, where they can excise any unhelpful portions so that they can concentrate on the most useful components, and they can also choose to add a note about the feedback that might help them address the issue raised in the feedback. Once the writer has completed these options, they’ll have the option of returning to the review report or viewing their revision plan.

When a writer adds a piece of feedback to a revision plan, they can use select portions of the feedback and add notes.

When viewing the revision plan, writers can delete individual pieces of feedback (should they decide they’re no longer helpful) or re-prioritizing by dragging and dropping feedback into a new sequence. Writers can continue to add notes to individual pieces of feedback, or they can use the “Additional Notes” option at the end of the plan to write free-form notes that might not have been addressed in their review feedback.

Writers can arrange the feedback they've added to a revision plan according to priority, can add notes to each piece of feedback, and can add free-form notes.

Once a writer is satisfied with a revision plan, they can use the “print report” option that they can keep with them while revising or give to their instructor.

Eli's printable revision plan strips away formatting and produces a very easy-to-read document. This can be printed on paper or saved as a PDF to be saved digitally.

What should instructors keep in mind?

• Short, focused comments are better: Ask reviewers to follow the best practice of creating new comments for each significant point they wish to make. This makes it easier for writers to evaluate and add feedback to a revision plan, rather requiring writers to hack apart a comment for the most useful pieces.
• Turning in a revision plan: Eli allows writers to create a PDF or print their plans in order to share them. Instructors often find it useful to see a revision plan from each student at the conclusion of a review in order to know what each writer understood to be their most valuable feedback.

We’re excited to hear about how you’re thinking about using or actually using revision plans in your class. Please share your ideas with us on Twitter, Facebook, or over email !