How to pilot Process Feedback for Google Docs at your institution

Schools, districts, colleges, and universities can begin with a free pilot for one academic term, with no obligation to continue, before committing to an annual agreement. This guide walks administrators through a pilot of the Process Feedback for Google Docs extension.

Want Process Feedback inside Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard, D2L Brightspace, or Schoology? See LTI integration instead.

Step 1. Understand why a pilot helps

The Process Feedback for Google Docs extension is free for individual teachers and students. Anyone can install it and use it, including teachers and students at your institution.

Individual free use, however, comes with no compliance coverage. When a teacher adopts the extension on their own, there is no signed agreement between your institution and Process Feedback. An institutional agreement is what officially deploys Process Feedback at your institution. It adds:

A signed Data Privacy Agreement (DPA or DSA), if your institution requires one
VPAT report for procurement review, plus a HECVAT report if your institution requires one
Scheduled privacy audits
Teacher training sessions and workshops
Support at an agreed response time

Institutional agreements are paid. The free one-term pilot lets your institution try this full arrangement before committing to an annual agreement. It also gives you time to complete procurement and privacy review, and to measure the results against your success criteria.

Step 2. Contact us to set up the pilot

To start a pilot, email us. You can include any questions you have, or book a meeting to talk through the scope of the pilot.

When you email us, include your institution’s email domain (for example, @school.edu), which students and teachers use to sign in to Google Docs. While we prepare the pilot documents, we disable the “Share this Report” feature for that domain, so no one signed in with an institutional account can upload report data to Process Feedback.

Step 3. Review the compliance documentation

In the pilot package, we send the pilot kickoff confirmation along with a certificate of data privacy and compliance (see a sample). If your institution requires a data security report (HECVAT), we send that too. If your institution requires a Data Privacy Agreement (DPA or DSA), send us your agreement and we sign it as part of the pilot.

Process Feedback is designed to align with FERPA and COPPA (U.S.), GDPR (EU), and the Australian Privacy Principles. Your IT team can also check our local-first design on their own. How the Process Feedback for Google Docs extension works describes the data flow.

Step 4. Decide whether to continue after the pilot

The pilot is free, and your institution commits to nothing by taking part. There are no obligations during the pilot, and you are free to discontinue afterward. If you continue, the Google Docs extension falls under Tier 1 (Extensions and plugins) of our institutional pricing.

It is Tier 1 because we do not collect any data. The extension generates every report on the user’s own device, and nothing is stored centrally. With the “Share this Report” feature disabled for your domain, institutional accounts cannot upload report data at all. Since there is no student data for us to handle or retain, you do not need Tier 2, which covers LTI integration and the online tools that require governed data handling.

Step 5. Install the extension

Process Feedback for Google Docs is available for Chrome, Firefox, and Edge. No user accounts are created.

IT administrators can follow our deployment guide to approve the extension, or to force-install it for your organizational units through the Google Admin Console. Teachers and students can also follow our step-by-step guide on how to install the extension.

Step 6. Confirm that everything works

The Process Feedback ribbon appears above the document, showing edits, authors, and time, along with a Writing Process Report button.
Clicking Writing Process Report and then Open Report opens the report in a new tab.
The Share this Report option in the report sidebar is no longer available.

Keep in mind that the domain setting applies only to institutional accounts. A student who opens a document with a personal account (such as student@gmail.com), including a co-author added by personal email, is not covered by it.

Step 7. Schedule teacher training

Teacher training sessions are included in the pilot. Email us to schedule a session for your faculty. Teachers can also join one of our live webinars.