Hearts practice has changed
What is it ?
Hearts practice is on the app, accessed by the icon I've circled in purple in the picture below.
These will usually give you sixteen questions from one completed lesson. Duolingo calls them challenges instead of questions but I think it's six of one & a half dozen of the other. About ten percent of the time, ten to fifteen of the questions will come from this lesson that Birdbrain has chosen for you, while the remaining 1-6 come from a lesson at L0, L1, or L2. It's possible but not likely that you'll get those 1-6 question from a skill at L3. It's far more likely that a skill at L3 will be the lesson Birdbrain selected for you to get 16 questions.
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One thing you could usually count on, was the last two questions asked you to fork over a French sentence given an English sentence. You could get one of these last two wrong and still get 15XP, but not if you got both wrong. If you missed one of the first fourteen, the best you could usually hope for is 14XP and sometimes they might really sock it to you with a 13.
This has now changed!
Listen and Respond
The first fourteen questions thing hasn't changed, if you've screwed one of those up you've usually screwed up your score. But the last two questions are different; I noticed it recently. Maybe Monday, Tuesday. Or maybe I picked those days subconsciously cause I wanted to watch Dalida.
You could get a Listen and Respond question as one or both of the last two questions. In the lessons, you might have seen them as Read and Respond questions, but now they want to test you on your listening skills. The answers are usually obvious if you've understood everything in the spoken sentence. What can happen, though, is you'll miss or not notice a verb tense or a turn of phrase or not remember a vocab word and then two answers might seem possible.
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A typical sentence is "Ben a monté les six cent soixante-quatorze marches de la tour Eiffel. Il voulait aller en haut sans prendre l'ascenseur. Il est épuisé". You'll be given three choices and the answer will be something like "Ben a pris les escaliers".
Au fait, je pense qu'il y a mille six cent soixante-quatorze marches de la tour Eiffel. 
. Quand on voit Paris en haut, on se dit qu'il n'est rien plus beau
Dictation
If Duo can't find two Listen and Respond questions for the lesson it's chosen, you get dictée.
My general rule of thumb is to call it what Duo calls it, but everyone & their grandmother calls it a dictée. When in Rome....
They tell you a sentence & you type what you hear, and with homophones, homonyms and paronyms this becomes harder. French is pretty famous for those three kinds of words.
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Before the change I could usually do four lessons in a fifteen minute timer. So far I've only been able to do three, but some of that is due to the lessons I'm getting. It goes without saying that the goal is also to run the 64-question table for the four lessons. It would be nice if you could activate that first-four-lesson of the day scorecard at other times during the day, particularly in simultaneity with a timer.
I don't have to much of an opinion on what is better. I can go to the web lessons, turn the keyboard off, and I get to work on the En-Fr challenges that I don't get with the new practice. I also thought it was a drawback that Hearts practice hardly ever gave read and respond or listen and respond questions; they've addressed that concern on the App.
This doesn't apply to the dumbbell practice on the web, you didn't always have the "Let's make this harder!" En-Fr questions for the last two. I haven't recalled seeing a Listen and Respond question on the web, but it's new, and I usually do way more lessons on the app. I did do ten dumbbells yesterday and got no Listen and Respond questions.
L1 
Advanced beginner