Crowdmark vs Feedbacker

Crowdmark is a web application for evaluating, discussing and responding to exams, essays, lab reports and other student work. Instructors can use paper assessments they already have, create assignments or set up exams with multiple-choice questions. They can scan and upload student work, while students can submit assignments using mobile phones. Grading tools support scores, graphical annotations, hypertext comments, mathematical notation and reusable comments. Crowdmark reports student performance by question and provides an API for extracting insights. Its FAQ lists roster and grade synchronization with Canvas, Brightspace/D2L, Moodle, Blackboard and Sakai. The Canvas connection can import courses, rosters, team members and sections, and export grades. The service serves higher education and K–12, with licensing options for instructors, departments, enterprises, schools and school districts. Prices are quoted by Crowdmark, and both course-based and annual subscriptions are listed. Crowdmark says personal information may be processed and stored outside Canada, including in the United States.

Feedbacker is an open-source higher education project by Steve Huckle, currently being rebuilt as a workflow, governance, and assessment layer around AI for educators. Its present direction keeps educators responsible for marks and released feedback rather than delegating those decisions to an automated system. The project calls for traceability across inputs, criteria, transformations, suggestions, edits, and approvals. It also aims to let institutions govern and replace models, prompts, data handling, retention, and deployment. Planned rubric-led cohort workflows are intended to support moderation and calibration while preserving academic judgement. Feedbacker’s previous application has been retired, so its earlier capabilities describe the former product, not the project’s current state. That application offered rubric-driven assessment and batch generation of criterion-referenced feedback, with educators controlling rubrics and final judgements. It generated draft feedback rather than making grading decisions. Institutions could use a public deployment or self-host it, with control over data and AI configuration when self-hosting. The project lists Linux, macOS, web, and Windows platforms.