What’s New in Knewton Alta – May 2020

Wiley is committed to a culture of continuous improvement with Knewton Alta, which is why we are always engaging instructors and students to gather feedback and optimize the learning experience moving forward.

As always, we are very cautious with our product releases to ensure minimal disruption during the semester, while continuing to provide an ever-improving experience for you and your students.

Below you will find information on enhancements made to Knewton Alta during the month of May. If you haven’t looked at Knewton Alta in a while, you’re missing something special.

Improved Student Context and Visibility into Assignment History

This update will help students (and instructors) to better understand their performance on an adaptive assignment and path to mastery, while providing transparency into the type of work that has been completed.

• Label and Filter mode of work: Easily see work done on prerequisite materials versus on assigned learning objectives. Identify work done before assignment completion, as well as extra practice.
• Filter History by Objective: Filter student history by learning objective to better understand the path to mastery for a specific objective – and what instruction or prerequisite support the student utilized.
• Question Response Details: On review of work completed, this update will provide additional details about how long students worked on a specific question or reviewed instruction, as well as time spent on an assignment.
• Work required estimates: Students will receive estimates on the work required to finish an assignment, while in progress, based on their performance and interactions.

Learn more on how instructors can monitor student progress here.

Learn more about how students can track their own progress here.

Improved Course Copy Functionality

Getting started is now easier than ever!

Our team has been head-down looking for opportunities to make improvements to the course building experience in preparation for Fall. A number of usability improvements have shipped in the past month and we’re topping it off with a boost to copying courses. When copying a Knewton Alta course, instructors now have more options to configure their new course such as setting your institution or changing the dates as they are creating it so you can hit the ground running.

Doubling Down on Grading Accuracy!

A large percentage of Knewton Alta questions are free response, especially in our math courses, and we’ve just released a new update to our answer parsing service to provide better symbolic equivalence checking.

Students submit answers in a variety of complex — but equivalent — formats, and our new parsing engine leverages the active development community around sympy, a python-based computer algebra system, to better catch tricky cases where complex student answers may not appear to match the format that a subject matter expert would use.

Check out the Knewton Blog each month to see the improvements we’ve made to Knewton Alta.