Today, with our latest release, Eli makes a big step toward supporting an activity that, until now, has always been on the drawing board. Since it was originally released, Eli has supported innovative writing and review functionality that makes coordinating the peer review process elegant and generate powerful reports about students as both writers and reviewers. However, while those features have proven very popular and helpful in the writing classroom, a crucial component has been missing: how to get writers to utilize the feedback they receive in a review task and produce a high-quality revision.
But not anymore. Today, we’re proud to introduce the first of three types of revision artifacts: the revision plan. The revision plan is a document compiled by the writer that offers a clear plan of action for revising a text. Writers can choose to add any piece of feedback they’ve received in a review to their plans or they can develop strategies from scratch. This artifact will not only give students a very clear, actionable plan for composing a revision, but will also give instructors insight into that student’s plan and whether or not they’ve developed a sound strategy. Likewise, if a writer adds feedback to their plan that they received in a review, their reviewer will get credit for having written feedback so helpful that the writer intends to address it in revision.
With today’s update, revision plans are available to all users, and with them writers can:
- add feedback received on any review to their revision plan for a writing task.
- prioritize the feedback they’ve added to convey importance or sequence
- clip the feedback they received to include only relevant portions
- add notes to feedback to provide further detail or strategy
- add free-form notes to address issues not raised by reviewers but still needing attention
- print their plans for note-taking during revision or to share with instructors (in the coming weeks, it will become possible to do this electronically, no tree-killing necessary).
The revision plan one of several revision-related features coming to Eli. We’re very proud of this feature that you can begin using in your writing classrooms today. In the coming weeks, we’ll be rolling out ways for instructors to enable and visualize the revision process in a way that no other technology can and artifacts that will complete the write-review-revise cycle. Those artifacts, all generated either by the writer or by Eli, include:
Eli already supports students submitting drafts of their writing and receiving peer feedback and, as of today, revision plans. Still to come are:
- Revise & Resubmit tasks – writers compose revisions of their texts and submit them in Eli. These texts will be stored as new but will be related to the original submission, which will make it easy to compare initial drafts with revised versions.
- Reflection – writers can be asked to reflect on their revision, paying particular attention to where they stuck to the strategies they laid out in their revision plans and whether or not they acted on their reviewer feedback.
- Revision Reports – both writers and instructors will have a detailed report that gathers all artifacts of the revision process in one place and makes it unbelievably easy to trace how a piece of writing evolved over time and what moves a writer made to improve that writing.
We are incredibly excited about finally closing the loop: write, review, revise! More importantly, we’re excited to see how you use these features.
