Looking forward to 2026

TimelyGrader has accomplished a lot this year. We’ve quadrupled the number of institutions working with us and…let’s skip the boring part where we sing our own accolades.

What excites everyone most at TimelyGrader is the potential for us to contribute to broader conversations about how assessment is changing because students and faculty can both ethically benefit from GenAI tools

These are the two principles that we follow, ones refined over the years by our Chief Learning Officer, Rob Peregoodoff.

1) We need to start focusing more on process over product. It’s not all about what the students hand in but how they got to where they are. We aren’t here to get into a debate about formative vs summative. We believe there should be more formative assessment.

This is easier said then done because the myriad of scalability issues to deploy formative assessment at scale. More on this later.

2) We should stop designing assessments for students with academic integrity challenges. Our team has spoken with many institutions who would rather focus on detection or prevent innovation because the fear of the few students who may take advantage of such innovation in the classroom. We will let others critique the hypocrisy of institutions spinning up committees for innovation.

What we believe is designing and new assessments for learning, assessments that ethical and dedicated students will enjoy tackling (with or without an AI-assist) and where slop is self-evident without the use of AI detection tools.

Here is how we will help instructors now & in the future.

We understand that we still need to tackle existing problems that instructors face today. For early 2026, TimelyGrader is evolving our support for grading across all types of assignments. We are going beyond our current capabilities (Single File Submission, PDF, Scanned Submissions, CSV, etc) and into complex submissions (Multiple Files in One Submission), and other subjects (Coding, XLSX, etc).

A quick look for 2026 features:

• Video & XLSX Grading: Grade multimedia submissions with ease

• Multiple File Uploads: Combine assignments in a single submission

• Instructor Insights Dashboard: Track progress and trends at a glance

• TimelyGrader Assessment Tutor & Formative Assessment Assistant: Support iterative learning and improvement

We also want to introduce how we envision our support for more formative assessment. TimelyGrader Assessment Tutor & Formative Assessment Assistant

With this feature, students can actively engage with their learning and receive AI-assisted feedback instantly. This feedback is trained and fine tuned by their instructors. Why? Well, they will be using the same feedback to do summative assessment anyways.

The potential for novel learning analytics and data would be significant. Here are some examples:

• Number of student engagement with AI (horizontal)

• Depth of student engagement with AI (vertical)

• Areas of most improvement (rubric criterion)

• Areas of weaknesses that still need to be addressed

• Potential grade improved based on the rubric

There will be new paradigms to assess student progress.

Stay tuned for more details as we roll out these features throughout 2026! As always, reach out to us if you have any questions!