Use a Feedback Machine

How students submit work to a Feedback Machine for iterative feedback — and how instructors can use the same machine themselves.

A Feedback Machine is a shared tool: you and your students use the same machine. Students submit their work and get immediate, criteria-aligned feedback — then revise and resubmit as many times as they like — while you can run submissions through that machine yourself and always see the full results. The more feedback-and-revision cycles a student goes through, the more their work tends to improve, and you can see all of a student's submissions to follow their progress.

Once a machine is published and set up in your Canvas course (or shared via direct login), it's ready to use.

Want to grade a whole class's submissions at once instead? See Bulk Grading Assist.

How students submit

Students open the machine (from your Canvas course, or a direct link) and submit their work in the format you configured:

• Text — pasted into the submission box (typing directly into it isn't supported), with a live character count.

• .docx or .pdf — uploaded; the text is extracted for evaluation.

• Multiple files — if you allowed more than one file per submission.

For group assignments, students can check "Submitting only part of the assignment?" so the feedback adapts to the portion they contributed.

What students see

After submitting, students get results organized into tabs:

• Submission — their original work.

• Rubric — per-criterion scores (only if you've made the rubric view visible).

• Feedback — narrative feedback: What you did well, Areas for development, and a prioritized list of Things you can do to improve.

A score appears only if you chose to show point values. Students select New Draft to revise and resubmit.

Use it yourself as an instructor

You can run a submission through any published machine yourself — choose Use on the machine, just as a student would, and submit a sample. This is the best way to see exactly what your students will experience before you share it.

You always see the full results — even what's hidden from students. When you view an evaluation (your own submission or a student's), you see the complete grade and rubric regardless of whether you've hidden point values or the rubric view from students. So you can keep scores or the rubric hidden to keep students focused on the feedback, and still review everything yourself.

Follow your students' progress

Because a Feedback Machine is shared, you can see how your class is using it — both submission by submission and at a glance.

Submissions

There are two ways to see submissions:

• Across the whole class — from your class page, select View all submissions to see every student alongside all of their drafts from every machine in the class, combined into one list.

• For a single machine — open that machine's ⋮ menu and choose Submissions to see just its submissions.

Either way, each student's drafts are listed newest first with score and status, and you can open any draft to read the full feedback and criteria breakdown, exactly as the student saw it. Because students can resubmit as often as they like, you see the complete history of their revisions, not just the latest one.

Insights

Open a machine's ⋮ menu and choose Insights for a summary of how the class is engaging with it:

• Active Students — students who have submitted at least once.

• Total Submissions — across everyone using the machine.

• Avg. Iterations — average submissions per active student.

• Avg. Improvement — the average score gain from a student's first submission to their best one.

• Avg. Effort — how much students revised between drafts, based on how much their text changed.

It also charts submission activity over time and the distribution of submissions, so you can see engagement and improvement at a class level — not just per student.

Tell students how to access it

Copy and adapt one of these for your assignment instructions, a course announcement, or a message to students.

Canvas

Get Instant, Actionable Assignment Feedback — We've partnered with Feedback Machines, an AI platform that gives you immediate, constructive feedback on your assignments, helping you refine and improve your work with every submission. To access the instant feedback, click the Feedback Machines link in the left menu, then click [use] next to the assignment you're working on.

Direct login