Packback Platform Release Notes Packback Platform Release Notes Welcome! This page is a record of key customer-facing changes in the Packback platform and AI. You can suggest features and changes at feedback.packback.co (and vote on other ones you like!). August 12, 2025 Cambridge International Education templates are live in the Content Library for users who belong to institutions with access to Cambridge content! August 8, 2025 We removed the Short Description field for new Deep Dives prompts! When educators create a new Deep Dive prompt, they will no longer see the Short Description field. Prompts that currently have a Short Description will remain as is. The Short Description still displays on the Deep Dive assignment and it can be edited on the Edit Prompt page. August 6, 2025 Instructors can Duplicate Writing Assignments from the Manage Assignments page Instructors can select “Duplicate” in the options for each assignment on the Manage Writing Assignments page This option: Creates a new assignment with the same start/end dates/times If it is a Deep Dive, the new assignment will have a slightly modified prompt (everything is the same except the prompt name), and the same rubric If it is an Originality Review, the new assignment will have the same max points and description as the original July 30,2025 Smart Highlighting for AI Risk Detection (in Deep Dives and Originality Review) is now available to students! Students can now access a smart highlighter within the AI Risk Report that shows which sections of their text have a high or medium likelihood of containing AI-generated content. The highlighter will only show up if the overall AI Risk indicator is High or Medium Refresh Button: To ensure students have access to the most current information, the report displays a panel to alert students when their AI Risk Report may be outdated after editing. Students can click a “Refresh” button after 5 minutes to generate an updated report. July 17, 2025 Writing Assignments now support Revisions Instructors now have the ability to request revisions from students during the grading process—supporting a more iterative, feedback-rich writing experience within each assignment. Key Features: Instructors assign revisions to students directly from the evaluation form, where they also provide feedback, scores, and comments Students are notified of their revisions via email, notification, and other elements on the platform When students begin their revision, they will begin editing from where they last left their writing Instructors have a new submission table designed to help them manage assignments where multiple submissions per student are a possibility Students have access to all past evaluations while they are drafting within Deep Dives While students are writing, they have access to a toggle at the top of their screen. This toggle offers them two view options: Your Draft and Your Resources: YOUR DRAFT While in Your Draft, students experience the normal drafting experience they have grown accustomed to YOUR RESOURCES Students see a list of all their past evaluations within that community From this table, they can choose an evaluation to view The student can use the draft/resources toggle to switch back and forth between evaluation and current draft at will July 9, 2025 Updates to the Create Deep Dive Assignment page: Reduced the size of the Assignment Type, Prompt, Rubric, and Benchmark Assignment boxes/buttons The Assignment Type descriptions and the Benchmark Assignment description are expandable/collapsable to save space Changed “Add a Smart Rubric” to “Add a Rubric” Moved the Assignment Dates fields to the bottom of the page June 11, 2025 Users can now sync assignment dates in Canvas! When an assignment is deep linked, the Packback assignment dates will not appear on the Canvas assignment set up page. However, after the assignment is Saved or Saved and Published and the assignment launches in Packback for the first time (which happens automatically), the dates will push over to Canvas. When the user goes to the Assignments page (where all assignments are listed), they will see the Due Date and Available From Date (if the assignment is not live yet) under the assignment title. Users can now sync assignment dates for non-deep linked assignments as well! When a user clicks “Create Grading Columns”, the assignment dates will sync with the assignment titles. When assignment title and dates are updated in Packback, the changes will automatically sync to Canvas! When assignment dates (start and due) are updated in Packback, the changes will automatically sync to Blackboard and D2L! June 5, 2025 For Originality Reviews and Writing Lab, the writing feedback category called “Content” is now called “Clarity”. June 4, 2025 Instructors can set visibility options on individual polls in poll assignments. They can create polls in active assignments as open or hidden. They can create polls in past/upcoming assignments as open or hidden. Instructors can toggle poll visibility states at any time within active assignments. All polls imported from the Content Library are set to “Hidden” by default. May 22, 2025 The real-time feedback in the sidebar has been redesigned! Each feedback category is now contained in its own panel that is expandable and collapsable. In Writing Assignments, this has eliminated the need to have a Feedback Summary panel and a panel for each category. An icon for Suggestions, Praises, and Alerts is now prominently displayed with each category. There is a new “Alerts” panel that contains a link to view unresolved feedback versus the link to “View All Unresolved Feedback”. This change is applicable to all assignment types and Writing Lab! May 21, 2025 The “Create Grading Columns” buttons have been moved to their own section on the Gradebook Sync page in Packback. May 20, 2025 Updates to the Manage Assignments screen for Discussion Assignments: We collapsed the bulk edit buttons into one dropdown menu to streamline the actions and make it easier to add new bulk action fields without cluttering the page. We added a bulk edit option for “AI Detection”, which allows an educator to change the AI Writing Detection setting on all their Discussion Assignments at once. May 14, 2025 Templates in the Content Library are now unpublishable. Creators of a template and admins can now choose to deactivate a template in the content library. This will filter out the template from search results for professors only. Admins will still be able to see unpublished templates in their search results. When a template is unpublished, it cannot be imported if a user navigates to its direct link and users will see a deactivated message; cloning single assignments will also be disabled Unpublishing a template will deactivate all versions of the template. Template creators and admins can reactivate a template, which will allow users to import it again. May 13, 2025 Educators now have the option to disable AI Writing Detection in Discussion Assignments (PBQ). When creating a new Discussion Assignment, there is now a new section called AI Writing Detection with a checkbox setting. The setting is enabled (checked) by default, but an educator can uncheck it if they want. When the setting is disabled, educators will not see the AI Risk report in the Originality Fingerprint and students will not get flagged for potential AI use in their posts. The setting cannot be edited after the assignment has posts. May 7, 2025 Deep linking is now available for all campuses using LTI 1.3 for their LMS integration. Deep linking must be enabled by the campus LMS administrator. When deep linking is enabled, educators can link to specific Packback assignments within the LMS. The Originality Review assignment type is no longer in Beta. The Beta pill has been removed within the Packback platform. May 5, 2025 Section-Based Grade Filtering & Posting for Writing Assignments Faculty and TAs can filter student submissions and post grades by section, providing more precise control over the grading workflow. This gives TAs and professors more flexibility when grading student submissions, which is especially helpful in large classes with multiple sections. Key Features Faculty can post grades to the LMS for specific sections of students rather than for all students Users can filter the submission table by one or more sections Consistent experience with filters automatically carried over from the submissions table to the post grades modal Compatible with existing filters for grading status and completion status April 22, 2025 Educators now have the option to disable the AI Risk indicator and report in Writing Assignments (Deep Dives and Originality Reviews). When creating a new Writing Assignment, there is now an additional checkbox in the Originality Fingerprint section to enable the AI Risk report. The setting is enabled (checked) by default, but an educator can uncheck it if they want. When the setting is disabled, students and educators will not see the AI Risk report in the Originality Fingerprint or the AI Risk indicator column on the assignment page. April 21, 2025 Single Sign On has been enabled for Packback employees! We enabled Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) for all Packback employees. This will ensure that we comply with the requirements mandated by our security auditors. Regular student and instructor users of our platform will continue to enter their email and password to log in. We have instituted the following rules regarding formatting of email addresses that can be used for admin/superadmin accounts: We will not allow admin/superadmin users to be created with non-Packback or alias emails. We will not allow users with non-Packback or alias emails to be updated (promoted) to admin/superadmin roles. The email must match the pattern x@packback.co with no “+” April 17, 2025 The Originality Fingerprint can now be enabled for students in Deep Dives! When the Originality Fingerprint setting is turned on for an assignment, students can view their Originality Fingerprint when drafting. To activate this feature for students, educators must enable the setting when creating/editing a Writing Assignment. All Writing Assignments (Deep Dives and Originality Reviews) will have this feature turned on by default. If an educator does not want it on, they can simply uncheck the box when creating their assignment. The feature will be turned off for all existing Deep Dives assignments to not create any confusion. If educators want to turn it on for an assignment they already created, they can simply check the box on the Edit Assignment page. (The setting can only be edited if there are no submissions.) When the feature is enabled, students will see the Originality Fingerprint panel in the sidebar when editing their Deep Dive assignment. When they have enough content written (at least 100 words) and want to generate their report, they can simply click the “Run Originality Fingerprint” button. Students can regenerate their report every 5 minutes by clicking “Refresh” in the panel. This feature will not appear for Benchmark assignments. When the feature is enabled, students will also see their Originality Fingerprint on the submission page as well as their Uniqueness and AI Risk indicators on the submission tab in their Deep Dive assignment. April 14, 2025 Originality Reviews can now display other document types in the Original Document tab! Previously, we could only display the document if it was uploaded as a PDF. Now we can display it if it was uploaded as a DOC, DOCX, or TXT too! April 9, 2025 The Content Library is now generally available for instructors! Instructors can now access the Content Library from their top navigation bar to view and search for reusable content. Instructors can now access our Content Library homepage at https://app.packback.co/content-library. Logged out users can also explore this page to see a list of publicly available templates. Instructors can publish their own content to the Content Library. Instructors can import courses into their own communities. April 3, 2025 Educators can now see the AI Risk smart highlighter in the AI Risk Report within the Originality Fingerprint for Writing Assignments! When an assignment has an overall AI Risk of Medium or High, a new smart highlighter panel will appear in the AI Risk Report to show which parts of the text are most likely to contain AI-generated text. Educators can click the arrows in the smart highlighter to view each section of assignment that may contain AI-generated text. This feature is available for Writing Assignments – Deep Dives and Originality Reviews. The smart highlighter will not show up with the overall AI Risk is Low or Unknown. April 1, 2025 If an assignment contains fewer than 100 words, the Uniqueness and AI Risk indicators will display as Unknown. When an assignment doesn’t have enough words, we cannot generate a reliable report. We previously had the Unknown status available for AI Risk, and it is now available for Uniqueness as well. This change to the Originality Fingerprint applies to all assignment types. March 20, 2025 Educators now have the option to add a description to their Originality Review assignments! When creating a new Originality Review (or editing an existing one), educators can now add a description! Students will see the description on the assignment page under the assignment title. If the description is longer than 250 characters, it will be truncated with a “View More” button. March 14, 2025 Students can now see their Originality Fingerprint on their Deep Dive submission after it’s graded! Students can now see their Originality Fingerprint when they view their submission after it’s graded (and the grade is released). Students need to navigate back to their submission from the evaluation screen in order to view the Originality Fingerprint panel. March 3, 2025 In Discussion Assignments, “Plagiarism Report” is now called “Originality Fingerprint.” We updated the text and colors of the “Plagiarism Report” in Discussion Assignments to match the Originality Fingerprint in Writing Assignments. Now, instead of selecting “Check Plagiarism” in the dropdown menu, users will choose “Check Originality” to view the report. Within the report, “Plagiarism” is now referred to as “Uniqueness.” The content of the report and the way the algorithms work has not changed. February 18, 2025 Packback Writing users can now view embedded PDFs in the “Original Document” tab in Originality Review assignments if the uploaded document was a PDF. When viewing an Originality Review assignment, users will now see a PDF rendering of the student’s original file in the “Original Document” tab if the uploaded document was a pdf. This is in addition to the link to download the original file. The “Original Document” tab, since it’s displaying a PDF version of the file, should have little to no visual/formatting differences from the original file. Educators can now select a “Writing Style” when setting up Writing Assignments (Deep Dives and Originality Reviews)! Certain writing styles are associated with specific writing feedback, so by associating a writing style with an assignment, students can benefit from additional feedback. February 14, 2025 Real-time Feedback can now be translated to different languages! In Writing Assignments, Discussion Assignments, and Writing Lab, the instant and chat feedback provided through the sidebar, smart highlights, and chat can now be viewed in the following languages: Chinese, English, French, German, Italian, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Tagalog, and Vietnamese. February 4, 2025 Benchmark assignments are now live for Deep Dives! Benchmark writing assignments will be free of AI feedback in order to give instructors a reliable measure of initial student performance and enable them to accurately track student progress with Packback throughout the year/semester. The benchmark option will exist as a toggle when creating/editing a Deep Dive assignment that instructors can select. If enabled for a specific assignment, students will not see the Feedback, Chat, or Sources tabs in the sidebar when writing their essay. Students will still see the History tab, which will allow them to revert their draft to a previous version. They will also see a message informing them they are completing a benchmark assignment. The benchmark indicator will be visible in the assignment feed for Deep Dives as well, so instructors can easily see when they’re grading a benchmark assignment. The benchmark setting can be changed for an assignment as long as no students have submitted an essay. Once an assignment has at least one student submission, the current benchmark setting will be “locked” in order to maintain a consistent and equitable experience for all students. January 30, 2025 Packback’s AI writing detection model has been updated! Users can regenerate older reports to use the new model. January 2, 2025 “Questions” is now “Discussion Assignments” on the Packback platform. Packback Question is now being referred to as “Discussion Assignments” within the Packback platform. December 3, 2024“Originality Report” is now “Originality Fingerprint”! In Deep Dives, the Originality Report, currently found within the AI Grading Assistant Tools tab of a submission, is now labeled “Originality Fingerprint”. The “Originality” score will now be known as the “Uniqueness” indicator, which provides a percentage of the student’s assignment content that is not matched to other sources. This change will be reflected on the Submissions table in Deep Dives and within the Originality Fingerprint. December 2, 2024Originality Review, Packback’s newest writing assignment type, is now available! Administrators and educators with access to Deep Dives or the bundle will now have access to Originality Review, a new writing assignment type. This assignment is quick to set up and does not require students to write in the Packback platform. When students submit an Originality Review, they will be asked to upload a file. When they do, they will receive feedback about their writing and be able to view their Originality Fingerprint. Providing feedback prior to submission will allow students to submit their best work! You will notice a Beta label on Originality Review assignment type. While we don’t expect to have a lot of bugs, it is certainly possible, and we will also be iterating on the feature as we get feedback. Students will not see the Originality Review assignment type unless an educator creates this assignment type in their community. Along with this change, some “Deep Dives” menus are now labeled “Writing Assignments” in several places on the platform. Some areas, like Match & Message and Insights, will continue to say Deep Dives and only display information that pertains to Deep Dive assignment types. December 2, 2024The Content Library now has a template tagging and filtering system Note: the Content Library is live for Superadmins/Packback admins and available to Faculty via direct link. The below features will be available to all instructors and admins when the Content Library is formally launched in early 2025. When users publish of a template to the Content Library, they can view, add, and remove structured tags for a template Structured tags include subject and grade level Tags are shown on the template info page and the published template Users can browse for templates by subject and grade level from the Content Library homepage October 22, 2024In Deep Dives, instructors now see students’ Originality score and AI Risk level in the Submissions table when assignments are submitted. The Originality Report, containing student’s Originality score and AI Risk level, was already available to instructors in the AI Grading Assistant Tools tab of Deep Dives when they grade a student’s assignment. Now the information is more readily available within the Submissions table! These two indicators are independent of one another: Originality is checking for content that matches other sources AI Risk is checking for the likeliness that content was written by generative AI October 10, 2024New Poll Reports downloads are now available to users: Single Poll reports are (as before) single .csv’s that contain all poll results for a single poll Poll Assignment Reports are single .csv’s that contain all polling results from each poll in a given poll assignment Community Poll Reports are single .csv’s that contain all polling results from the entire community When the user seeks to download one of these reports, a pop-up will appear: The user can select if they would like this report to include the submitted at date and time for that poll or not; single reports always have this column We have updated this column on ALL relevant reports to translate the submitted at time and date to the appropriate time zone Once the user selects “Download”, the report will be generated and sent to the user in a notification and an email once complete October 8, 2024Students now see a Post-Submission pop-up when they publish a post in Packback Questions! The pop-up contains the curiosity score, and information on the student’s progress on the given assignment Students see the curiosity score of their submitted post, and how many questions/responses they’ve posted for the assignment The pop-up for when students don’t meet the curiosity score minimum still exists and now includes this additional context The pop-up provides students with exploration options so they can keep exploring and posting Options to “check out hot posts” and “check out undiscovered posts” will take the students to a presorted view of the Explore tab Students have a “Surprise Me” button that takes them to a random question they haven’t written or responded to October 8, 2024On the Packback Questions Discussion Feed, the Guide Post and What’s Due? components are now combined. Guide Posts now have a preview modal that allows users to read the contents of the post without navigating away from the feed The Guide Posts and the What’s Due? items of this component have the same display logic as before Instructors can edit or delete Guide Posts by clicking on the gear icon (only visible to them) on the upper right hand corner of the component This component was designed to clean up the top of the Assignment Feed and match the look of the explore tools on the Explore tab October 7, 2024It is now easier to create new courses from templates through the Content Library! When creating a new course, users can now enter in their course details as part of the community creation flow. Previously, courses created from templates used the details from the original community, requiring users to go back and edit their course details post creation. When creating a new course from a template, we are also skipping the product selection page to help reduce confusion/concern with seeing a price When creating a new community from a template in an account that doesn’t have a contract, we default to using the bundle for the community If there is a contract, we create the new community using all of the available products under the contract September 6, 2024The Content Library is now LIVE for Superadmins/Packback admins and available to Faculty via direct link! The Content Library is a new tool on our platform that enables instructors to use content from other Packback users in their own courses. Users can also choose to publish content to make it available for other instructors. The Content Library consists of templates, which are containers for assignments. A template can be imported into a new or existing course. This will copy the template’s assignments and their basic attributes such as titles, due dates, question/response counts, Deep Dive prompts and rubrics, and poll options into the destination community. Single assignments can also be imported. Templates don’t contain instance specific content, such as students questions, responses, poll submissions, or Deep Dive submissions. What can Faculty users do with Content Library today? Starting today, faculty users can now import templates with a direct link! If they are provided with a link for either a public or private template, they can now import the template or its individual assignments into one of their communities. They will see a dropdown of the current courses from which they can choose their destination community. Note: Faculty users are still not able to publish their own templates or “see” the main Content Library homepage. These will be available in subsequent updates. September 4, 2024Discussion Feed Improvements & Continuous Discussion are now LIVE When accessing a Packback Questions Discussion Assignment, user will see two tabs: The Assignment Feed, where they will see all questions posted to the assignment (and posts from Past Assignments if Continuous Discussion in ON) A new Explore tab, where sorting, filtering, and searching tools will help users discover thought-provoking questions from all assignments. Continuous Discussion is a setting that allows students to respond to posts from earlier in the term for credit on an open assignment. This Feature is ON by default in new communities, but can be toggled ON/OFF on the PBQ “Manage Assignments” page. How does this affect grading? Students can only ever receive credit on open assignments, and their responses will be intuitively assigned to the appropriate assignment. When Continuous Discussion is ON and there is more than 1 open assignment, students will be able to choose which open assignment their post will be applied to. When Continuous Discussion is OFF, there are no significant changes to users’ previous experience with Assignment Based Grading. Instructors can reassign any post by clicking on Options on the post footer and selecting Reassign. July 24, 2024We have shortened the Community Lookup Key (CLUK) for each community CLUK Format: The CLUK is now a 9 alphanumeric character code. It is presented to students as XXX-XXX-XXXX. Presentation: Instructors can present the CLUK to students from the homepage where students can manual input the CLUK or scan a QR code to join a community. The Invite Students Page now dynamically prioritizes the appropriate options for instructors to invite students depending on their segment and LTI status. July 11, 2024Packback communities now have a homepage and a streamlined sidebar menu The new sidebar provides clearer organization of available products and supports the release of a new community homepage. This UI change makes platform navigation consistent with the user experience in Writing Lab. Instructors will now have a view of our different tools organized by product. Students will not see the community management, Match & Message, or Insights tabs. The Community Management pages now have individual Save buttons. The new homepage provides a central landing spot for students and instructors that will enable them to quickly access any of their enabled products or open assignments. Instructors will be able to quickly view insights for PBQ and DD on the footers of the product cards on this page. Instructors and students can access our Help Docs directly from each of the product cards. Instructors and students can see a list of open assignments for each of our products (PBQ, DD, Polls) on the new homepage, providing a comprehensive overview of activity. June 11, 2024Sandbox communities are given to instructors upon account creation When an instructor’s account is created, their account will get a blank bundle sandbox community that expires are 120 days If an instructor has a current sandbox community and they are on the product selection page during community creation, they will see a message encouraging them to visit their sandbox if they’re not sure which product to use Sandboxes are transformed into regular communities when students are added to them (roster upload, add student by form, LTI connection, or CLUK access). May 21, 2024Our new Polls tool has been released! Polls now have their own assignment structure that are similar to but separate from Packback Questions assignments, following the same “Open”, “Closed”, and “Past” logics. Instructors can quickly open and close poll assignments from the Poll Assignments page. Poll assignments can be managed via a “Manage Assignments” page where users can add new poll assignments as well as reorder, rename, and access more editing options for each assignment While editing a specific Poll assignment, users can set start/ends dates for an assignment, edit the assignment’s title, reorder the assignment’s polls, add polls to an assignment, edit polls belonging to an assignment, and view a preview of each poll Polls have several improvements since their transformation from in-class discussion polls Quick response: students can now respond to a poll directly on the poll feed and do no have the option to input text with their selection Instructor view of poll responses has an improved list component while student users can only see numerical results Poll titles do not need to end in a “?” May 8, 2024Copying Professors Questions and Polls for Packback Discussion When you or an instructor goes to copy a community from a template, you will see a field called “Instructor Questions”. If checked, the following will happen upon copying: Instructor Questions (that includes Questions with Choices) will be cloned and populated in their respective PBQ assignments These Question style posts will have a publishing timestamp that corresponds with the moment a community is copied If a post is pinned in a community’s assignment, that post will retain its pinned status in the new community Only published posts will be copied; drafted and scheduled posts will not carry over to the new community When you or an instructor goes to copy an existing community, you will see the option to “Copy Poll Assignments”, and the suboptions to copy the “Start & Due Dates” as well as the “Professor Content (Polls)”. If checked, the following will happen upon copying: Polls will be cloned and populated in their respective Poll assignments These polls will have a publishing timestamp that corresponds with the moment a community is copied Apr 30, 2024Due Date Extensions for Deep Dives This feature allows users to set deadline extensions for students for Deep Dive assignments. A few notes on functionality: A user must set a Due Date and Time for a Deep Dive assignment in order to add an extension. Just like the deadline extension feature in Packback Questions, a user can add a student’s name or email and choose an extended deadline for the Deep Dive. This process can be repeated for multiple students in the community. Removing a deadline will delete any extensions that were previously added. The extension deadline must be after the original due date. Users can add deadline extensions for new and existing Deep Dives. Mar 29, 2024Easier Assignment Management for Deep Dives Exciting news! Instructors can now manage Deep Dive assignments in one centralized location, just like in PBQ. Here is what instructors can do on the new Manage Assignments page: Add and edit assignments Delete assignments (cannot delete if there are submissions) Utilize drag-and-drop functionality for easy reordering, shaping the assignment order within the open/closed view and DD instruct. Inline title edits for quick adjustments. Feb 8, 2024Match & Message for Deep Dives The powerful messaging tool originally built for Packback Questions is now available for Packback Deep Dives users! Professors now have access to a powerful comparison tool so they can more easily reach out to students who have shown growth between two assignments, students who have NOT shown growth between two assignments, or students who scored below a certain threshold for any given assignment. Dec 22, 2023Improvements to Assignment Copying Instructors can now select specifically which attributes they want to carry into a new community, such as assignments, due date, titles, Guide Posts, and more. Dec 2, 2023NEW! Insights into Deep Dive Assignments Instructors can now view insights into: Student Participation: See how engaged students are in specific assignments.Rubric Insights: See criterion averages in a given assignment.Overall Stats: Get quick assignment performance insights (participation, average score, and % graded). Oct 3, 2023Due Date Extensions for Individual Students in PBQ Instructors can extend the deadline of a discussion assignment for an individual student. They can choose to add the extension in just one assignment, or in multiple for recurring extensions. August 31, 2023Separate Deadline for Questions Instructors can now require that Questions be posted midway to an assignment’s due date. August 1, 2023Assignment-Based Grading in Packback Questions Instructors can now create assignments by module or topic, with flexible due dates, assignment naming, and re-ordering. June 22, 2023Gradebook Sync for Deep Dives Instructors connected to Packback with LTI version 1.3 can now automatically sync grades back to their LMS using Packback’s Gradebook Sync. April 3, 2023Hiding and Posting Grades in Deep Dives Teachers now have the ability to keep grades hidden in Deep Dives until they choose to release the grades to students. February 28, 2023Smart Highlighting for Deep Dives Guiding Questions This feature helps instructors more easily find where in students’ essay the student attempted to answer the guiding questions as per the assignment. February 16, 2023Plagiarism Diffs in Deep Dives Instructors can now more see a side-by-side diff comparison of the student’s text to the matched text. February 15, 2023In-line Commenting in Deep Dives Instructors and TA’s can now mark-up students’ essays with comments, giving our instructors yet another way to provide quality feedback to students! September 13, 2022Packback Deep Dives We are thrilled to announce that our newest product, Packback Deep Dives, is now available to add to your Spring 2023 classes. We are currently running a closed early-access program to the product. Open access to all our users will start on January 1, 2023! August 5, 2022LTI Roster Imports (IN BETA) Schools using LTI 1.3 now have the ability to import course rosters into Packback. Note: this is in beta form and will still require testing in different LMSes. July 18, 2022Google Classroom Packback now supports Google OAuth Single Sign-on and roster importing through Google Classroom for K12 users. July 14, 2022QR Codes QR Codes are now available to teachers on each Question in a community. June 13, 2022Community Copying Enhancements When copying a community, users can now edit fields before creating it. Previously you’d have to copy over everything and edit it later! May 12, 2022New filter for Match & Message For instructors who use Packback Instruct, they can now optionally filter their messages to students who belong to a particular section in a Packback community. Apr 12, 2022Roster Upload Email Domain When uploading a roster, a professor can now directly edit the email domain of all students on their file. Apr 6, 2022Updated Mobile Styling The community feeds and post pages now have a sleeker UI when viewing on a mobile device. Apr 5, 2022Copying Communities Professors now have the ability to copy their Packback communities semester-over-semester. It will retain the settings of whatever community you are copying! Apr 5, 2022Scheduled Questions Professors and TAs now have the ability to schedule their questions ahead of time! Apr 1, 2022Enhanced Gradebook Sync in LTI 1.3 We have enhanced our gradebook sync capabilities in communities that use LTI version 1.3. The most notable difference is that Packback makes grading columns automatically in the LMS gradebook now. Students also do not need to access each assignment link to get a grade! Mar 18, 2022Filtering the Community Feed Students and instructors now have the ability to filter the Community Feed to questions from a specific assignment or deadline. Feb 15, 2022Packback Polls Improvements We’ve made some UX/UI improvements to our Packback polls in Packback Instruct! Students will now see a more seamless way to answer in-class polls without leaving the feedback. Instructors can now download multiple poll CSVs with results in one email. Jan 1, 2022Packback Instruct Launch Packback Instruct is now LIVE and available to add to your Packback communities! Dec 22, 2021PayPal You can now check out your purchase for a Packback community with a PayPal account. November 10, 2021Upload your roster into sections We’ve added the capability for instructors to put a CSV file of students into a Packback section, if they use them! November 1, 2021Coach/Praise Feedback We made some cosmetic improvements to the way instructors give coach/praise feedback on posts so that you can view the entire contents of the post while you write your feedback. October 19, 2021Previewing Posts We made it easier to read an entire post without leaving the community feed. Try clicking on the “Preview Post” link on each question and check it out! October 12, 2021A behind-the-scenes update… We know this page has been quiet! It’s because our engineers are hard at work building our new add-on product, Packback Instruct, which will go live in January 2022. Check it out! September 10, 2021Delete praising or coaching feedback on a post Today we added the ability for professors and TAs to remove any feedback they’ve left on a post! August 30, 2021Packback Communities have a fresh new look! We have revamped the look of your Packback communities with a new look! We’ve cleaned up all the links and added them to a sleek sidebar. You can still access all the tools you are used to in the sidebar. You can also collapse it down to make more room on the page. July 21, 2021LTI Gradebook Sync Instructors can now automatically send their grades from Packback into the LMS gradebook if the course is integrated via LTI. Packback supports this feature in Canvas, Blackboard, D2L Brightspace, and Moodle. July 16, 2021Unsubscribe to Specific Emails All users can now unsubscribe from specific types of emails! That means you can remove yourself from “reply” emails if you have a popular post that is blowing up your inbox. 😉 The only emails you CAN’T unsubscribe from are account verification, password reset emails, and alerts when your homework post has been moderated.Message help@packback.co at any time if you want to opt back in to certain emails. July 8, 2021Gradebook Override: the whole class! Professors and TAs can now override the grade for the entire class in the gradebook. Click the Override Grades button at the top of the gradebook. You can choose between changing everyone’s grade, or just those students who have zero credit so far. A dot indicator next to the grade means that it’s been overridden! July 2, 2021Gradebook Override Professors and TAs can now override the grade for each individual student in the gradebook. Click the pencil icon next to a grade to change it – a dot indicator next to the grade means that it’s been overridden! June 14th, 2021Community Start Date Once your community has started, instructors will no longer be able to change the community’s start date if you’ve decided to use Packback’s automated grading deadlines. This is to cut down on grading mishaps and confusion! You can always use our “skip deadline” functionality if you want to skip the first few grading periods on Packback.Edit Your Posts Any Time! Students can now edit their post content ANY time – yes, even after someone has replied to it! Packback used to lock down the edit button once another user had replied to your post, but we realized that was hurting more than helping! May 19th, 2021Presenter Mode Privacy Change When you turn on “Presenter Mode” it will work as usual, but will also now remove the campus associated with a user or post. April 29th, 2021Explore Mode Privacy Change As of this evening, any user who is trying to view a community or a post of a community that they are not a member of, they will not be able to see it. Admins will continue to be able to see any post or community.
