While you were recharging this summer, we were busy building a better Extempore. With the release of new features and upgrades to improving the Extempore experience for teachers and students, we're excited to share some big updates:

The highlights

• Extempore Live — live interpersonal speaking assessments, rebuilt around how your class actually runs with new tools to make set up and monitoring even better
• Asynchronous written responses — group students for interactive text chat with typing indicators and real-time response notifications
• Assessment-level rubrics — grade a student's performance holistically with one rubric at the assessment level instead of one per question
• Class-level Teaching Assistants — share a single class with a TA without sharing your whole account

• Bulk import — push assessments into multiple classes (or from a colleague) in one step

   

Extempore Live: interpersonal speaking, minus the chaos

The biggest release of the summer. Extempore Live (formerly Synchronous Groups) rebuilds live group assessments around what you need before and during class.

What's new:

• A dedicated attendance step: mark students present or absent before launching the activity
• Easier room setup with drag-and-drop, shuffle, clear-all, and add-room controls
• Save room assignments ahead of class, or move straight into the live session
• A monitor view showing who's online, waiting, recording, or done
• Drop into any room to observe or support students mid-assessment
• Reset completed rooms from the monitor view when students need another attempt

Click here for an interactive example

Whole-class speaking assessments used to mean juggling logistics in real time. Now you have control before students hit record, visibility while they complete the assessment, and a predictable experience on both sides of the screen.

Asynchronous written responses: text chat that still feels live

Teachers can now group students for asynchronous written response activities, giving students a structured text-chat space to respond to one another without needing everyone to be speaking at the same time.

Students can see who's typing, and each response triggers real-time notifications so the conversation keeps moving as classmates reply.

Written interpersonal practice should still feel interactive. This gives students a lower-pressure way to communicate in the target language while giving teachers a clear, group-based format for text-based exchanges.

Grade the whole performance with assessment-level rubrics

You can now attach a rubric to the entire assessment, so you can evaluate a student's complete performance across a multi-question task — no more filling out the same rubric question by question.

From the gradebook, you'll see all of a student's submissions for the assessment on one page while you grade:

• Needs Your Review: submissions waiting for your evaluation
• Auto-Graded: multiple choice questions already counted in the score

Question-level rubrics aren't going anywhere, use them whenever you need granular scoring.

This makes grading less repetitive, provides more consistent scoring, and a clearer view of each student's complete work.

Set up all your classes in a fraction of the time

Managing multiple classes? You can now bulk import assessments from an existing class (yours or a colleague's) into several classes at once, instead of copying one class at a time.

• Less duplicate setup at the start of the term
• Easy sharing across a department
• Better support for common curriculum and shared assessment plans

Invite Teaching Assistants to just one class

TAs can now be invited at the class level instead of the account level. Previously, inviting a TA meant granting access to every class, assessment, and gradebook tied to your account. Now you can share exactly one class and nothing else.

• Better privacy and control for teachers
• Accurate access for TAs who support specific sections
• A cleaner fit for schools using classroom support staff and LMS rostering

Existing TAs are automatically converted to class-level TAs for the classes they already had, and primary teachers can be invited as TAs when needed. Supported for most LMS integrations.

A better experience for your students

Rubric results are easier to read. The student rubric view now shows up to four ratings in a row with smooth horizontal scrolling to see more, with additional UI improvements for touch screen and mobile devices.

Images can be expanded and panned. Students can zoom into and pan around any image during an assessment across every response type, including image-based multiple choice options. Visual prompts are easier to inspect without losing their place, particularly on small screens.

No more "where did my class go?" If a student logs in with no active classes, Extempore now surfaces their archived classes with a clear path forward.

Smoother assessment creation and grading

• Smarter defaults for new assessments: grade publishing now defaults to manual instead of immediate, so you decide when students see their grades
• Inline multiple choice editing: see text, video, audio, and image choices while editing, without expanding each option
• Gradebook bulk actions: mark complete, reset, or unlock submissions in bulk
• Cleaner setup screens: irrelevant options are hidden (not just grayed out) for group assessments, and helper text moved into tooltips

And a stack of smaller fixes

• Clearer in-session messaging when someone leaves a live group recording
• Clearer confirmation copy when deleting a multiple choice option
• Google Classroom turn-in status now syncs after grades are provided
• Better handling of submissions with no audio
• Class list sorting improvements

The bottom line: every update this summer serves the same goal: less time fighting workflows, more time supporting students. Log in, poke around, and let us know what you think. More is on the way this fall.