For the product updates of 2020, see Product Updates 2020.

27/12/2021 - Distribution definition and functions

Do you want to create exercises to let your students practice with calculations on distributions? This is now possible with our new distribution parameters! You can define three different distributions and use these, for example, to calculate the cumulative distribution function or a specific quantile. Read more about the available parameters and operators in this help article.

To provide students with the most informative feedback available in the system we updated the feedback which is shown during a (review of) a test.

As of now, the platform will use the following logic to show feedback in the test context for multiple choice answers:

For open questions, the feedback shown in the test context is created using the following logic:

More details on how to create specific feedback for exercises (both for in tests and for practice) can be found in this help article.

12/10/2021 - More insights into test attempts done by students

When looking at the overview dashboard of a test you can see the aggregated data for all students, or inspect the data for an individual student. The aggregated data is based on one attempt of the students, but what if you want to look at other attempts a student has done? This is now possible!

For each student we now offer the option to see all test attempts and navigate to the answers given in that attempt:

More information about the data shown in the test overview dashboard can be found in this article.

31/8/2021 - Tutors get more rights on editing additional time in tests

Within a course you can divide students into groups to, for example, group statistical data and give additional time for tests. Both teachers and tutors are allowed to move students between groups. In addition, all settings of a test can be changed by a tutor with the appropriate edit rights.

However, up until now tutors with edit rights on a test could not change the course-related settings of this test. To make the rights of a tutor more consistent we changed the rights for this specific scenario. Tutors in a course with edit rights on a test can now also edit the course-specific settings.
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More information on how to give specific (groups of) students extra time during a test can be found in this article.

When changing the settings of a manual test you can see which questions are going to be used. Before today, each question was only identified by its numerical ID. To make it easier to recognise the questions we also added the name of the question to the edit screen:
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More information on the configuration of manual tests can be found in this help article.

All of your content is contained repositories. You can create many different repositories to keep things organised. Unfortunately, when you created a repository with a new name this name was not immediately shown. Only if you reloaded the page the name would appear. This bug has now been fixed.

Read more information on what you can do with repositories in this help article.

From now on manually adjusted grades will also be synced to the Gradebook of your LMS.

This allows you to adjust the grades in Grasple without having to worry whether the grades in the LMS Gradebook are up to date. This improvement will ensure that after each adjustment the highest grade is automatically calculated and synced to the LMS Gradebook.

The Gradebook feature is available for LTI 1.3 integrations with Brightspace, Canvas, Moodle and Blackboard.

Do you want to create exercises where students have to transform numbers between bases such as Binary and Decimal? You do this now by using the two newly added operators "Read Decimal from base" and "Display Decimal As Base".

Now you can create exercises asking students to provide non-decimal numbers such as binary or hexadecimal.

Read more on how to create such an exercise here.

Do you want to create exercises to let your students practice with Boolean Algebra and Logical Expressions? This is now possible with the support of logical expressions in Grasple. You can use this both in parameterisation and directly in exercises when asking for a logical expression.

Read more about how to use this new feature here.

All of your content is organised within repositories. Over time, your list of repositories can grow and keeping things organised can become harder. To help with this organisation we updated the repository overview page, all of your repositories are now by default shown in a list:

In this view you can sort the repositories on all columns, making it easier to find the repository you need.

Don't worry, if you prefer to have an overview of your repositories shown with cards there is still the option of switching back. Read more about this option in this help-article.

When a student joins a course it is desirable that they immediately see the course content in the correct language. The choice for displaying either English or Dutch content as a default was possible, but could only be managed by contacting Grasple support. To provide you with a faster way to change the default language of your course we added the option to change this default in the course name edit screen:

More information on how to change the content, the name, the description, and the default language of your course can be found in this article.

Adding students to your course can be done by publishing a course link or inviting students manually. Using a course link is convenient, but you could only acquire such a course link by requesting one from Grasple support. To make this process easier we added the ability to create and edit course links to the teacher dashboard:

For now this functionality is available for teachers and organisation administrators.

More information about this functionality and others ways to give students access to your course can be found in this article.

Sometimes you want to get a quick overview of a subject. Other times you may want to create an off-line copy of a subject and all of its exercises. This now became easier with the print preview of a subject. All subjects which you can see as a teacher now offer a print preview button in the more-menu:

The previews shows the introduction and all of the slides of a subject. In addition, all exercises are shown, including the feedback (if any) for all answers. Should you miss anything or have other remarks about this preview please let us know in the chat!

You can now filter all learning analytics on your course groups to get a more in depth view on how specific groups in your course are performing. In this way you can help specific groups in your course with the subjects or exercises they are struggling with according to insights you gain from our dashboards.

Have a look here to see which learning analytics you can find in Grasple, both for students practicing and doing formative/summative tests.

Sometimes you want to give partial points for an answer. You can now do this automatically by assigning partial points to (open) answer (rules).

During editing of an exercise you generally only specify whether an answer is correct or incorrect. In addition you can now assign a percentage of the maximum points to an answer or answer rule as well. When a student gives that answer (or their answer triggers that answer rule) they will get the percentage of maximum points you specified. This works both in tests and during practicing.

Read more about how use this new feature for your exercises here.

Grasple is built to help you test on a large scale by automatically evaluating students answers based on the methods of evaluation you created in the test questions. However, sometimes answers can't be automatically evaluated. For example if the student made a mistake in their Latex syntax or if evaluating the answer takes too long.

With this new feature, you can view these unevaluated answers after the students finished their test and manually grade them yourselves.

As a teacher you sometimes want to give a student's answer partial points because it shows they understand the question partially. You can now assign partial points when adjusting the marking of a student's answer in a test! In addition to changing from incorrect to correct (or vice versa) you can also independently assign (partial) points to that specific student answer.

Read more on how to adjust marks in tests and how to use this new feature here.

Through different channels we learned that the UI for editing answer rules could be improved: the exact semantics of the save button was not always clear. To mitigate this issue we added an explanation of the semantics and updated the close button:

We updated the way in which numbers separated with a comma are rendered by our LaTeX renderer. Before, the renderer would add a space after each comma, which causes decimal numbers to be seen as two separate numbers. From now on, the renderer does not add this space anymore:

Finding the test results of a specific student in a long list of students can be troublesome. To make this easier we added the possibility to sort the test results based on the name of the students or the student id (if available). From now on, clicking on the header of these columns in all test dashboards will sort the results for you:

In addition, we added the actual correctness percentage to the question results column.

More information about the available test dashboards can be found in this article.

In some scenario's it is desirable to allow a summative test to be only taken from specific IP addresses. This use-case is now supported by the platform! Organisation admins of an organisation can now configure which (groups of) IP addresses are allowed to start a test within a specific course:

More information about this feature can be found in this help-article.

A student is now labeled as active in your course if they completed one subject or test. Before a student was only labelled as active if they completed a subject (not a test).

Go to Monitor to see how many students are active in your course.

In the Subject Dashboard in Monitor you can now sort on correctness score of exercises. This should help you focus on the exercises with the lowest correctness score in subjects in your course.

Read more about the exercise metrics dashboard in this article.

Creating better tailored and more specific feedback became a bit easier by the addition if the Numerical check method for math answers. This check can be used to determine whether (all elements of) a given answer evaluate to a (complex) number. Some example cases are:

Read more about the Numerical check method in this article.

Additional interface elements are added to inform the student that they have unsaved changes to their answers in a test. In this way also new students, not used to the interface will receive clear textual feedback on the state of their given answer.

Read the updated article explaining how to see if an answer is saved or not here.

Do you want to search for a specific set of courses in your organisation? The advanced search options lets you do this. With the advanced search options you can use AND, OR, "" and - to combine terms (with AND or OR), search on exact matches by adding quotes and exclude terms by using the minus sign in front of the term.

Read more on the advanced search options here.

In your repositories overview you can now also search on subject name. This makes it easier to find subjects you're looking for in your collection of private, organisation and community repositories.

Read more about the available search options in the repository overview here.

While generating values for formula placeholders the generator tries to simplify the given expression. In some cases, the generator would simplify a factorial expression (such as (2n)!) to a Gamma function (such as gamma(2n -1) ), which does not always make things clearer. To prevent these more complex expressions we made sure the generator no longer generates these Gamma functions.

Read more about creating parameterised exercises in this article.

Want to know which and why certain exercises in your course are answered incorrectly by your students when they are practicing? You can now see detailed information on all your exercises in your course:

Read more on what information is available in this article.

As organisation admin you want to easily keep track of courses in Grasple and quickly find the course you are looking for. This update makes this easier by adding support for updating the status of a course and searching for courses in the admin panel.

Additionally, this search functionality is now also available for the repository tab in the admin panel. More information about the status of courses and search functionality can be found in this article.

In some cases the answer to an exercise requires an inequality sign, which is not available on your keyboard. This symbol (and others) can be entered by using their LaTeX-code, in this case \neq, but not everybody is aware of this.

To make things simpler we added an additional set of buttons to the answer menu. With this set you can easily add different equality symbols:

Experiencing a slow editor when working on exercises with large lists of parameters can be frustrating. To speed things up we (among other things) reduced the number of parameters and example values which are shown by default. Naturally, you can still access all of the parameters and more example values by means of these newly introduced buttons:

Moreover, you can hide all parameters and their example values by clicking the 'hide placeholder values' button. More information on how you can use parameters in your exercises can be found in this article.

As organisation admin you want to easily lookup a teacher in Grasple. You can now quickly search for teachers using the new search bar in the admin panel teacher overview.

After finding the teacher you can also quickly navigate to one of their courses or repositories. Read more about this new functionality in this article.

The select all button in the repository page of a specific subject was not working anymore due to a bug. This has been fixed, letting you easily select all exercises in a subject and link them to another subject or test. Read more on how to do this in this article.

Apart from some stability changes we deployed a small change in the subject editor. As of today, new text and question slides will be inserted directly after the slide you are currently editing. Read more information about the subject editor in this article.

Want to know why certain questions in a test are answered incorrectly by your students? You can now see more details on the given answers for open (math) questions in the test question dashboard. Read more on what information is available in this article.