Courses and questions

This guide explains how to prepare a course: create it, upload the materials for the AI, invite the students, write and import the questions, and clone the course for the following year.

Who is a teacher

An account becomes a teacher account when an administrator enables it. You cannot make yourself a teacher, and an account already used as a student cannot become a teacher.

As a teacher you see every course created by you and by the colleagues in your same working group. When you sign in to PeerCards (address /peercards/) you land on the Teacher Dashboard.

The Teacher Dashboard

The dashboard groups the courses by year. Each year is a panel that opens and closes with a click; the most recent one is open.

For each course you find:

• the edit icon next to the name: it opens the course form in the administration area;
• the list of assignments, each with the Open badge, the Due: date and the Actions menu:
• Invite: page with QR code and code to project in class;
• Participants: subscribed students and groups;
• Monitor: who answered what;
• Evaluate: evaluation of the answers;
• Grade: grades per student;
• Edit: assignment settings;
• the course buttons:
• Add Assignment;
• Add Question;
• Questions and Quizzes;
• Glossary, or Create Glossary if the course has none;
• Evaluation Summary (course-wide summary of the evaluations).

At the bottom of the page, Create New Course opens the course creation form.

Assignments and running them in class: see Assignments and Running an activity in class.

Create a course

1. On the dashboard click Create New Course.
2. Fill in the fields: - Title: full name of the course. Students see it and the AI uses it as context. - Name: short acronym, for internal use. - Year: the starting year of the academic year. For 2026/2027 write 2026. The field suggests the current academic year. - Description: short description, visible to students and to the AI. - Degree program: gives context to students and to the AI. - Language: the language the AI peer writes in. The default is Italiano.
3. Optionally add materials in Course files: see below.
4. Save.

Two courses with the same Name and the same Year cannot exist in the same institute.

To edit a course click the edit icon next to its name on the dashboard.

Materials for the AI (vector store)

The AI peer of an assignment can answer using the course materials (slides, notes, papers). PeerCards uploads them to OpenAI into a search archive called a vector store.

1. Open the course form.
2. In Course files add one file per row, with an optional Description. Save.
3. Click Sync Vector Store at the top right.

On the first click PeerCards creates the course vector store. Every click uploads only the files not uploaded yet: the Uploaded to vector store column shows which ones already are. If there is nothing to upload, you see the message No new files to upload.

When you delete a file or a course, PeerCards also removes it from the vector store, unless another course (for example a cloned copy) still uses it.

To let the AI use these materials, enable Use rag in the assignment: see Assignments.

Invite students to the course

You can enrol students in the course in two ways:

• With the course link. In the course form click Invite Students: the link is copied to the clipboard. Paste it into an email or a message. Whoever opens it is enrolled in the course after signing in.
• With an assignment. When a student subscribes to an assignment (QR code, link or code), they are enrolled in the course too.

Students enrolled in the course appear on the Participants page of every assignment, in the In the course, not subscribed section, until they subscribe to the assignment.

Questions

Structure

• A question belongs to a course.
• A quiz is an ordered set of questions. It is optional: it orders the questions and gives the AI the context of the questions that come before.
• Tags are free labels to filter the questions in the list.

Create a question

1. On the dashboard click Add Question. The course is already selected.
2. Fill in the main fields: - Name: short internal name, not visible to students. You see it in Monitor and Evaluate. - Title: short title shown to students. - Quiz and Order: the quiz the question belongs to and its position in the quiz. Questions without an order appear in a random order, the same for the whole group. - Tags and Note (internal notes, not visible to students). - Question: the text of the question. - Reference answer: a correct answer. The AI evaluation uses it. - Grading rubric: criteria to evaluate the answers. The AI evaluation uses it. - Is closed: tick it for a multiple-choice question, then add the choices at the bottom of the page, marking the correct ones and an optional Feedback. - Open section question: for a closed question, the text shown below the choices, above the written answer field.
3. Save.

For a closed question the student ticks one or more choices and still writes an answer. In Monitor the answer counts as correct only if the selected choices match the correct ones exactly.

At the bottom of the form you can also add correction regular expressions: a pattern, a colour and a note. The parts of the answers that match the pattern are highlighted in that colour on the Evaluate page.

On the Quizzes page, opening a quiz, you edit all its questions on one page. There you also find two question fields:

• Expected answer length: indicative number of words for students and AI (default 150). It is not a limit.
• Evaluation weight: how much the question weighs in the grade (default 1). See Evaluation and grades.

See the question as a student

In the Questions list click Preview on the question row. You see the answer page as the student sees it. With Preview AI Answer you can generate a sample answer from the AI peer.

Import many questions from Excel

To load many questions at once use an .xlsx file and the Question batch uploads section of the administration area.

1. Prepare the file: - the header row, with the column names, is the first row that does not start with #; rows starting with # are ignored (use them for comments); - required columns: name, question; - optional columns: quiz, order, title, tags (comma separated), reference_answer, note, is_closed, open_question, and for closed questions up to five choices: choice_1, choice_1_correct, choice_1_feedback, … choice_5, choice_5_correct, choice_5_feedback; - for is_closed and choice_N_correct write true, yes, 1, si or sì; - any other column stops the upload.
2. In the administration area open Question batch uploads and click Add question batch upload.
3. Enter a Name (name of the upload, unique in the course), choose the Course and upload the File.
4. Save.

What happens:

• if the quiz named in the file does not exist, it is created;
• if a question with the same name already exists in the same quiz, it is updated instead of duplicated; the choices in the file are added to the ones already there, so check them;
• every question also gets the tag batchUpload: <upload name>, handy to find it again;
• if the file contains an error, no question is saved: read the message, fix the file, upload it again and save;
• a successful upload becomes read-only and cannot be deleted.

Import the questions of another course

1. Open the form of the course that receives the questions.
2. Click Import questions from another course.
3. Choose the Source course and click Import questions.

PeerCards copies questions, choices, correction regular expressions, reference answers, quizzes and tags. Questions already imported from that course are skipped: you can repeat the import without creating duplicates.

Clone a course for the following year

Use Clone course when you run the same course in another academic year.

1. Open the form of the course to copy.
2. Click Clone course.
3. Check Name, Title and Year. The suggested year is the following one.
4. Click Clone course.

The copy contains:

• the same course settings (description, degree program, language);
• the same teachers;
• all the quizzes, tags and questions;
• the same course files and the same vector store, shared: nothing is uploaded twice.

The copy does not contain students, assignments and glossaries: invite the students to the cloned course and create its assignments.

PeerCards refuses the copy if a course with the same name and year already exists: change one of the two.

Warning: the vector store is shared. A file you add and sync with Sync Vector Store in either course also ends up in the materials used by the AI of the other course. Keep this in mind if a material must apply to one year only.

After the copy you are the owner of the cloned course.

Glossary

Every course can have a glossary where students enter terms and definitions. From the dashboard:

• Create Glossary creates the course glossary;
• Glossary opens Glossary Terms Overview, where you can look for synonyms and duplicates and open Glossary Students Overview (per student), which you can export with Export to Excel.