Focus on what students do

On Rbean, a course is broken into modules, which are broken into projects. Projects are the building blocks of the learning experience. They can be series of exercises, heavily scaffolded projects or open-ended questions. It’s flexible!

Each project is its own little ecosystem, with resources that students can “pull”, quizzes to self-assess, reviews to get feedback, flashcards for long-term memory gains, and a community space to co-construct knowledge. You can also add hidden resources just for TAs.

Ditch the grade book and multiply opportunities for feedback

Feedback is an essential component of learning, and it’s important that you have full control over your feedback strategy. With Rbean you can have as many feedback sessions as you want, during and after a project. They can be configured as done by a teacher, a peer, the students themselves, a jury, or an external referent. They can give points or not. Also, they can be done synchronously (an appointment would be set up automatically) or asynchronously.

(We also have an automatic correction engine, though it’s more geared towards technical projects that can be corrected by a computer program.)

Choose meaningful markers of progress

There are currently two ways to track progress on Rbean: skills and competencies.
Skills allow you to attach experience points to questions during reviews (or for the simple act of filling a review if you want to give points for participation). Competencies allow you to define criteria for different levels of expertise in a competency, and to pick a demonstrated level of expertise during a review.

You can use one system, both, or none, depending on your assessment strategy.
You can see below how competencies are attributed during reviews.

Switch up assessment tasks

Compose rich quizzes with multiple-choice questions, sorting, pairing or mapping tasks. All types of questions can be used during reviews or in self-serving quizzes for students to diagnose their own learning.

You decide what your resources look like

Our authoring tool lets your format content as you wish, add documents in-line, upload or embed videos, and embed websites through iframes. It makes it easy to use what you’ve built on another tool directly in the flow of learning resources.

Leverage game design techniques for deeper learning

The essence of game design is giving players meaningful choices on their journey to mastery - and this applies to gamification as well.

For now we have a few mechanics available for projects: the possibility to have bonus points in a project, to have parts of a project that unlock at the completion of other parts, and for students to choose between variants of a project. We also have achievements and an internal economy to buy “power-ups” (extending a deadline, getting a tip, buying credits for automatic corrections... stuff related to the learning process itself).

You can see below how a student would buy a tip and how parts of a project might be locked.