Let’s wrap up 2025 by telling you about one of the biggest product updates in Breakout’s history.
Since the beginning, our platform has evaluated student performance using Bloom’s Taxonomy-based rubrics. After extensive work and testing by our product and instructional design teams, Breakout now evaluates the quality of the discussions themselves – measuring critical thinking, peer engagement, and evidence-based reasoning through our new Discussion Quality Rubrics (DQRs).
It’s a big step forward in our evaluation system, and we’re excited to tell you about it in more detail below.
Alongside DQRs, we’re announcing a new partnership with OpenStax, launching a powerful new oral assessment tool, and shipping workflow upgrades that make active learning and assessment easier to run at scale.
Let’s break it down!
🎯 Discussion Quality Rubrics (DQRs)
We’ve rebuilt how Breakout evaluates student conversations. Historically, our metrics leaned on Bloom’s Taxonomy to describe the level of thinking prompted by your activities. With Discussion Quality Rubrics, we now focus directly on how strong the discussions themselves are.
DQRs assess three key dimensions of student contributions:
- Reasoned position & evidence – Are students making clear claims and supporting them with specific evidence?
- Peer engagement – Are they listening, responding, and building on each other’s ideas?
- Critical thinking – Are they working with your course concepts in appropriately complex, thoughtful ways?
DQRs ask, “How well did students actually discuss the ideas?” The rubrics rely on observable behaviors – so it’s clearer to you, and to your students, what “high-quality discussion” looks like.
By default, these rubrics power the Contribution portion of a student’s score in Breakout. The big picture: you now have a research-based, discussion-specific way to assess student talk at scale – without manually scoring every transcript yourself.
📚 Breakout Learning x OpenStax
We’re excited to announce our partnership with OpenStax, the nonprofit leader in peer-reviewed college textbooks!
Through this partnership, Breakout Learning will be building original discussion modules on OpenStax content, combining their high-quality educational materials with our structured discussion framework. Students using Breakout Learning will also have direct access to OpenStax materials through our platform.
The result? Students get quality, peer-reviewed content alongside the active learning experiences that make the content stick. For instructors, it means seamless integration of trusted course content with the engagement students need to succeed.
This partnership reflects what we believe about education: students deserve both excellent resources and meaningful ways to engage with them.
Reading is just the start – students need to talk, think, and grapple with ideas to truly learn them. 📚
🎤 Solo Oral Assessment
With our new oral assessment tool, you can turn written exams into scalable, AI-assisted solo oral assessments that still use your content, your questions, and your rubrics.
Traditional written exams have serious limitations:
- AI has made written exams less reliable – students can generate essays with tools like ChatGPT.
- Written work doesn’t fully capture communication skills, the ability to think on your feet, or how students respond to challenges.
- Grading takes hours, and it’s hard to stay consistent across responses.
Solo oral assessments in Breakout are built to solve those problems. Get custom insights into your students’ learning – at scale.
How it works:
- Your Content – Base the assessment on any course material: readings, lectures, cases, problem sets, frameworks.
- Your Questions – You design the prompts and scenarios so the exam measures exactly what you care about.
- Your Rubrics – You define the evaluation criteria with our rubric design method. Breakout’s AI doesn’t invent its own standards; it applies yoursconsistently across every student.
- Solo Oral Format – Students respond verbally to structured prompts, explaining their reasoning in real time.
- AI-Powered Evaluation – AI evaluates responses against your customized rubrics, applying your standards consistently and returning detailed analytics and feedback – without hours of manual grading.
What makes this different?
- Authentic evaluation – Students must think in real time; they can’t outsource their responses to AI.
- Assessment aligned to your goals – Rubrics can target conceptual understanding, application, analysis, evidence-based reasoning – you decide what matters.
- AI assists, you control – You choose what’s assessed, how it’s weighted, and what “excellent” looks like.
- Scalable and efficient – Oral assessment becomes practical even in large courses, with no need to schedule one-on-one meetings.
Students experience oral assessments individually, working through prompts based on your questions. They articulate understanding verbally, explain their reasoning, and demonstrate mastery through spoken responses – all evaluated against the rubrics you’ve designed.
Great use cases include:
- Practice midterms and finals (low-stakes prep with feedback)
- Formative checkpoints across the semester
- Comprehensive reviews that span multiple modules
- Case analysis and recommendations
- Problem-solving assessments where students explain their reasoning as they go
Oral assessments can be scheduled directly through Canvas or Brightspace D2L, and results sync automatically – no manual data transfer.
Instructors are already seeing the impact:
“Those who used [Breakout] did significantly better than those who did not, about one full standard deviation better on the midterm…”
– Dr. Olav Sorenson, UCLA Anderson School of Management
🧑⚖️ Peer Review in Breakout
You can now optionally require peer reviews at the end of a Breakout session.
Participants provide structured feedback on their group members’ performance directly within the platform, giving you:
- A clearer picture of how students experienced one another’s contributions
- More insights into participation
- A built-in way to encourage accountability and reflection within groups
It’s an easy toggle for you – and a powerful feedback loop for your students.
⚖️ Light Moderation Tools
Keeping discussions balanced just got a little easier.
During a session, participants who are under- or over-contributing now receive gentle, in-session nudges. These prompts are designed to:
- Encourage quieter students to step in, and
- Gently remind more vocal students to make space for others
You stay in control of your assignment design, while Breakout quietly helps support more equitable participation moment-to-moment.
🎭 Sophia Roleplays (Coming Soon)
Our AI discussion partner Sophia is stepping into more sophisticated roles.
The first Sophia Roleplays are finalized and will be available to students soon. These scenarios let learners:
- Practice oral skills in structured, conversation-driven situations
- Respond to Sophia as she plays different roles (e.g., a stakeholder, a patient, a client, a peer)
- Receive consistent, scalable practice opportunities – even outside of scheduled class time
Combined with our other updates, Sophia roleplays are another step toward robust oral assessment that doesn’t depend on everyone being in the same room at the same time.
If you have 6 minutes to spare (or 3 minutes, via 2x speed 😉), this roleplay negotiation will blow your mind!
Interested in testing out these exciting new features? Sign up to walk through these updates with a member of our team or check out our self-guided demo here!
Here’s to better discussions, smarter assessment, and a strong finish to 2025. Thank you, instructors, for all you do. We can’t wait to continue supporting you in 2026.
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