Getting started with unsupervised activities

Step-by-step setup

1. Make sure to communicate expectations to your students well in advance (consult your institution's policies for deadlines and other constraints). Set clear instructions telling students that all work should happen in MATCHA, including reading and note-taking. Consider making the submission of a complete MATCHA-generated record of work part of your grading rubric. Include MATCHA's Student's Guide by reference in your syllabus, or at least the section titled Your Information and Privacy, so that students understand what information MATCHA can collect and how it will be used.
2. Create an account in the MATCHA Dashboard and create a course if needed.
3. In Activity Settings / Browser , create a browser configuration. Make sure that all your course readings are available online and allowlisted in the browser configuration. Note that the default browser allowlist includes over a thousand publisher websites and other academic resources. But you may need to add your university's LMS. Tip: most textbooks are available as online ebooks on platforms such as Google Play, which students can access within MATCHA's browser.
4. Create an activity and enable the built-in browser. Select the browser configuration you created in step 3.
5. Decide whether students may use MATCHA's built-in AI assistant, and if so at what level. For unsupervised activities, an instructor-configured assistant can give students a permitted source of help inside MATCHA instead of pushing them toward outside AI tools.
6. Ideally, pair the activity with a Follow-up quiz . If you choose to do so, you will need to design a reusable quiz in Activity Settings. We provide suggested questions to make this easy. Plan to review and edit AI-generated questions as part of the grading workflow (if grading using MATCHA, each student's quiz will appear as an additional tab in their project file). After you have administered the follow-up quiz in person, review AI-flagged cases and apply a grade penalty as appropriate.

Recommended activity settings for unproctored activities

• Proctoring: off. This is the normal choice for take-home or remote work.
• Availability, start and end: set dates and times. The availability times in MATCHA set hard limits for when students can work on an activity (or generate a submission document). The end time is not their deadline. It is the time past which you definitely do not need to accept more submissions. This is often set to a date after the course ends. We ask for an end time for housekeeping purposes, not to police deadlines. Deadlines are communicated using a separate, optional setting.
• Writing time : Set your activity's deadline here. This is for information only as deadlines are not currently enforced by MATCHA.
• Word limit : If desired, specify a word limit with possible enforcement. Note that MATCHA has no word limit in the Notes tab.
• Notes: enabled. Encourage students to use MATCHA notes rather than external tools.
• Browser: enabled. Normally, students need course readings, library pages, and your LMS. By using the built-in browser, they can create a record of their work process.
• Anonymous submission: optional. Use it only if anonymous grading is part of your process.
• External-Paste Block: enabled. This is one of the most important deterrents for unsupervised work because it prevents direct transfer from AI tools or other external sources. If you turn it off, externally pasted text is marked.
• Complete Work History: enabled. This captures detailed browsing history, enabling detailed reports of how much each cited (or uncited) work has been read. We consider this feature to be crucial for unsupervised work. If enabled, be sure to warn your students in advance and point them to our Student's Guide for information, because this feature has privacy implications. Make sure to include a reference to our Student's Guide in your syllabus.
• Single-App Mode: optional. This prevents switching to other apps on the same device and makes AI misuse on the student's own computer significantly harder. This feature is primarily meant for supervised settings, but it does not hurt to use it in unsupervised settings to reduce temptation. Many students report liking it because it forces them to focus on their work. (Enforcement of Single-App Mode is limited in unprotected settings since MATCHA cannot lock itself permanently. In any case, students can consult AI and other resources on another device.)
• AI Assistant: optional but recommended. To help discourage disallowed uses of AI, we recommend enabling MATCHA's AI assistant at a level that fits the assignment: grammar only, grammar and style, or full composition. If you want to help your students learn writing mechanics, turn on pedagogical mode. This makes the assistant act as a tutor rather than auto-corrector. AI-made changes are tracked and reported in the Writing Analysis, so permitted AI use remains visible in the work record. Be explicit in your syllabus and activity instructions about what level of AI help is allowed.
• Follow-up quiz: enabled .