Reflections
I wrote several reflections (“My Experience with Teachers,” “Is It Bad Sportsmanship to Run Up the Score in Youth Sports?”), and I’ll probably do several more because the integration cleared QA last Friday after consecutive early morning sessions with the development team.
I am excited and proud to say that the integration with Moodle is up and running!
TypeID: 100% match (below is the ML output)
Time Writing: 02:54
Words per minute: 53
Total Words: 153
Backspace %: 8.18
Today, the above is part of the student interface, building transparency directly into the system to support Academic Integrity while providing new data to students about their writing practice.
As subscribers here, you’ve been along for at least part of our bootstrapped journey, which started last October. A lot can happen in 11 months:
we’ve trained the model four different times,
we shifted from capturing via laptops to web-based capture,
we competed in the Heartland Challenge Startup Competition,
we participated in the UMD Startup Accelerator,
we ran a series of (international) focus groups to ensure we are providing value to teachers and students pedagogically (in addition to authorship verification), and
we built an integration to the world’s most used learning management system by number of students/users (Moodle).
And yet, it feels like this is just the beginning.
How can you help?
We’ll be shifting our focus from building to researching now. You can help us make that shift successfully in a few ways:
Get a demo: we want to practice showing this off and hear your feedback. Schedule a session here.
Use Cursive: If you’re willing to give us 10 minutes, you can verify that Cursive works for you and help us improve by following these easy instructions.
Share this newsletter: if you know an administrator or faculty who values writing in the classroom where Cursive might help, forward this email.
Give feedback: with the integration development complete, we’re researching and designing the next features with teacher feedback. If you’re a teacher or faculty willing to meet with us, please reach out (replies here come directly to me).
The first new feature will be the “Diff Engine,” which we’ve teased.
Imagine you had x-ray vision and could discern between what students wrote and what was added through copy/paste, injected by the browser, corrected by Grammarly, or otherwise added through a means that was not the student typing on a keyboard. How would you want that displayed?
Three examples are below:
Example 1: includes pasted text at the beginning of the text.
Example 2: includes pasted text within the entry
Example 3: comprised of significant editing, including large deletions and rewriting.
Thanks for being on this journey with us,
-Joseph