What's new in Flash Reference

The list of cards on the left of the card editor now shows each card's front the moment you save it. Before, a new or changed card could stay blank for a while as a picture of it was made.

New colors from Look and feel in a deck's Settings show in the list straight away too.

When a deck sits in a small frame in your course or on your website, students can now make it fill their screen. They select Full screen, the last button below the card. To go back, they select it again or press Esc.

The button shows wherever the course or website allows full screen, as Canvas, Moodle and our WordPress plugin do. iPhones don't support full screen, so it doesn't show there.

The admin page with your LMS connection details is now called LMS Setup, so it's easier to find when you're connecting Flash Reference to your courses. Select LMS Setup in the admin sidebar.

Nothing on the page has moved. Your consumer keys, secrets and WordPress setup are on the same tabs as before, and links to the old page still work.

Have slides, a PDF or notes? Your own AI tool can now draft a deck's cards from them. In the card editor, open the Create With AI tab, choose how many cards and what kind, and copy the prompt into ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot or whichever AI tool your school allows, along with your file.

Paste its answer back and you'll see every card before it's added. Your file stays in your AI tool: Flash Reference only gets the cards you paste.

Not a Canvas admin? You can still use Flash Reference in your own course. Canvas lets teachers add apps to their courses unless the school has turned that off: in your course, open Settings, then Apps, and add Flash Reference with your organization's consumer key and secret.

The Canvas guide now walks through each step, where instructors get the key and secret, and what to do if your school doesn't allow it.

New organizations now get a few short emails over the first couple of weeks of their free trial: how to make a first deck, connect your LMS and invite your instructors, and how students study with flashcards. Each one only comes if you haven't done what it's about yet, and they're always at least 12 hours apart.

To stop them, select Unsubscribe in one, or turn off Tips during your free trial in Notification settings.

When we reply to your support request, the email now shows our message the way we wrote it, instead of jumbled text.

Line breaks in our replies, like the lines of a signature, now come through too, in the email and on the request's page.

Right after signing in, your dashboard or admin pages sometimes looked broken: the account menu stayed open, and buttons and menus didn't respond until you refreshed. They now load properly the first time.

This page lists every change you'd notice in Flash Reference, newest first. Each one says whether it affects students, instructors or admins, so you can skip what isn't for you, or use the buttons at the top to see only one group's changes.

Open it any time from What's new in the sidebar of your dashboard or admin pages. The number beside it shows how many changes have gone live since you last looked.

The admin home now opens with how much your organization's decks are used. Student activity shows active students in the last 90 days compared with your plan's limit, plus the decks studied and marks made in the last 30 days. Below it are a chart of active students per week and Most-used decks (30 days), which you can download as a spreadsheet.

The totals of decks, students and instructors are gone from this page. The Decks page still shows how many decks you have.

Now and then we send instructors and admins news about Flash Reference, like new features or planned maintenance. It arrives in the bell at the top of your dashboard and admin pages, and by email.

You get both until you turn one off: select your name in the top corner, then Notification settings (it used to be called Email settings). Unsubscribing from an announcement email leaves announcements on in the app.

A deck's name, sharing, folders, study options and look and feel are now together in one Settings panel, with tabs for Details, Study options and Look and feel. Change anything on any tab, then select Save changes once to save it all.

Open it with Settings on the deck's row in your list of decks, or at the top of the card editor. It replaces the Edit, Study Options and Edit Deck Look and Feel buttons.

Flash Reference now has step-by-step guides with pictures of the real app. Students learn how to open and study a deck, instructors how to build decks and read results, and admins how to set up the account, manage people and handle billing. Setup guides cover Canvas, Moodle, D2L Brightspace, Blackboard Learn, Schoology, other LMSs and WordPress.

Select Help in the sidebar of your dashboard or admin pages to open your guide, or Docs on our website. Students can read theirs without signing in.

Your dashboard now shows how students are doing on every deck you own or help edit, over the last 7, 30 or 90 days: how many studied, their marks, and the share marked Know it, each compared with the period before.

Worth a look suggests what to do next, like adding a hint to a card students keep missing. Your decks and Cards students find hardest follow. It shows numbers only; a deck's results show students by name.

The Getting Started videos are no longer on the dashboard.

These went live together:

• Any card can have a hint, not only cards with a picture.
• Deleting a card asks you to confirm first.
• Adding cards from a list saves the hint you put between the front and back.
• Signing in takes you straight to the right page for your role.
• In your LMS, Choose a deck has a cleaner look, an Add button on each deck, and a New Deck button that opens the new deck form.
• Your LMS secrets in Settings have a copy button.
• Removing someone from your organization keeps their decks: you choose the instructor who takes them over.
• Restrict Access to Learning Management System now keeps a deck off WordPress sites, and students there are asked to open it from their course.

Send us a question from the chat button in the bottom-right corner of our website and your dashboard, or from the support page on any device. You don't need an account: just give your name and email address.

We email you a copy of your request, and email you again when we reply. Each email links to the request's own page, where you can reply and see where it's at. Only you and our support team can see it.

Students can now study a deck from the keyboard alone, and screen readers announce each card, the answer when it's flipped, marks and multiple-choice results. Card text grows with the browser's zoom and text size, and Single-key shortcuts can be turned off in Settings for people who use speech input.

Instructor and admin pages start with a Skip to content link, and cards can be put in order with arrow buttons instead of dragging.

Our accessibility statement and conformance report say what we've tested, what we haven't yet, and what still needs work.

The admin home and the billing page now show your active students against your plan's limit. An active student is any student who opened one of your decks from your LMS, or from your website while logged in, in the last 90 days. Instructors, previews and website guests don't count.

At 90% of the limit, a banner appears on the admin pages and we email whoever manages billing. If you go over, we email again, then once a month while it lasts. Students are never blocked.

Each deck now has a Results page that shows who's studying it, how they're doing, and which cards the class finds hardest, so you can see what to go over in class or which cards need rewording.

Open it with Results at the top of the card editor. Look at one course or all of them over the last 7, 30 or 90 days, and select Download CSV to save the students or the cards as a spreadsheet. Admins can see results for every deck in their organization.

Admins can bring colleagues into Flash Reference from the Users page. Select Invite, enter an email address and choose Instructor or Admin. The person gets an email with a link to join your team and choose a password.

Invitations last 7 days, and you can resend or withdraw one that hasn't been accepted. Your first admin is always included; inviting more admins needs a plan that includes multiple admins.

Flash Reference now connects with LTI 1.3, the newer standard for LMS tools. In Canvas, Moodle and D2L Brightspace, an admin connects by pasting one Registration URL, found under Settings → LTI 1.3. Other LMSs that support LTI 1.3 can be connected by hand.

With LTI 1.3, instructors in Brightspace and Schoology can choose decks from a list inside their course, as Canvas and Moodle instructors already do. Connections made with a consumer key and secret keep working.

Multiple choice gives students another way to test themselves: each card becomes a question with four answers to choose from. The wrong answers come from the deck's other cards, and students see the right one as soon as they answer.

Turn it on in the deck's Settings, on the Study options tab, and students can switch to it while they study. A deck needs at least four different short answers first. Right answers count as Know it and wrong ones as Still learning, so they show in your results.

When students open a deck from your course, their progress is now saved to them: their marks, their review schedule and the card they stopped on. If they stopped partway through in the last two weeks, Flash Reference offers to take them back there next time.

If their connection drops, marks wait in the browser and are sent when it's back. Students should open the deck from your course each time, not from a browser bookmark: each visit's link stops working after 12 hours without use.

Flash Reference now emails you the first time a student studies one of your decks, with a link to its results. On Mondays, a weekly email sums up how students did on your decks in the past week, with the hardest cards, for up to five decks. It's only sent in weeks when students studied.

Both go to the deck's owner and contain counts, never students' names. Turn either off in Notification settings, under your name in the top corner, or with Unsubscribe in the email.

Until your organization is set up, the home page opens with Get your decks to students: four steps from connecting your LMS to a student studying your first deck. It ticks off each step as you do it, and Hide this list puts it away.

During the free trial, a banner shows when the trial ends, and we email whoever manages billing a week before, the day before, and when students can no longer open your decks.

Spaced repetition brings each card back just before a student would forget it. Cards they know return after longer and longer gaps; cards they're still learning return soon. A few minutes every day or two works better than one long session before a test.

Turn on Spaced repetition on the Study options tab of the deck's Settings. Students can then choose Review to study the cards that are due, plus a few new ones each day. Schedules are saved when students open the deck from your course.

Students who study a deck on your WordPress site while logged in can now have their marks and review schedule saved, just as they are from your LMS.

An admin sets it up once: use version 1.1 or later of our plugin, create a site secret on the Integrations tab of Settings, and paste it into WordPress.

Visitors who aren't logged in study as guests, and nothing is saved for them. To ask them to log in first, turn on Require login in the plugin's settings.

After flipping a card, students now choose Still learning or Know it. At the end of the deck they see how they did, and can study just the cards they're still learning instead of starting over.

Marking is on for every deck unless you turn it off on the Study options tab of the deck's Settings.