Learning Technology Blog ¦ Royal Holloway, University of London

E-Learning and the pencil metaphor

2012-01-04T12:43:00.001Z

As both an enthusiastic producer and fierce critic of mediocre infographics, I was pleased to discover, through Professor Steve Wheeler, this simple, effective and meaningful image courtesy of Positive DV8R blog.

I have found all six types of person in the places I have worked - even in e-learning businesses! In academia, those who are leaders in their field are rarely so in adopting and embedding new technologies, although their are notable exceptions to this assertion (Andrew Chadwick & Nick Lowe are two who spring to mind).

I spend much of my time whittling away at the Wood while being poked by one or two Leaders and Sharp ones. There is, however, a missing component; those that are somewhere between the Ferrules and the Wood; they don't want tried and tested modes being compromised by untrusted methods. This is the action zone in my view, where we can maintain and extend excellence in teaching, learning and assessment. We, as Learning Technology champions, should not let the elegant design of the pencil undermine our impact.

Crowdsource request: Using Personal Response Systems to record attendance

2011-10-26T11:43:00.001+01:00

We’re looking to hear from practitioners who have experience of and/or thoughts on using Personal Response Systems in support of attendance registers. Have you piloted or implemented this? Are you thinking of doing so? What are the challenges and solutions? How have you gone about doing this?

A chance meeting (read: eavesdropping) with some Departmental Administrative staff led to a conversation about the challenges presented by recording mandatory lecture attendance of students in larger courses (100+). The challenges are that a paper-based approach is unreliable, duplicates recording and sharing activities, and disrupts lectures.

This prompted an unrehearsed elevator pitch on the merits of using Personal Response Systems / Clickers to quickly and efficiently record and store attendance records. My pitch included the following workflow, advantages and rebuttals:

Workflow

Proposed workflow

Advantages

Technology is already in use at RHUL – short, shallow learning curve
Quick and easy to ‘sign in’ - utilises limited contact time well
Use supported formats – can be shared with colleagues and with other systems (e.g.,Registry)
Can be linked to Moodle activity – extending the use of the consolidated VLE/MLE

Rebuttals

Too expensive to provide handsets to students – not when compared to 9K a year fees. By enough and the price could be as low as £20 a piece
Difficult to set-up – the clickers will have to be linked ONCE to their owners while a single PowerPoint file can be created, duplicated and shared as necessary
Students will lose them – people lose house keys, car keys and bank cards yet these persist
Not every room has a PC – AV supply clickers and clicker ready laptops, the larger venues are fully equipped
Students might ‘sign-in’ on behalf of absent colleagues – as they might do already on paper, a more challenging question may deter this, or to avoid fleeting visits have a question at the start and on at the end of a lecture

Can you add to these points?

Moodle news @ Royal Holloway, University of London

2011-09-20T12:40:00.000+01:00

Moodle VLE (http://moodle.rhul.ac.uk) Build: moodle 1.9.13

Moodle-Turnitin Integration

Turnitin's Moodle integration activity module is a standalone Moodle module with the aim of representing the full suite of Turnitin's features within Moodle. The module was developed with the full support and backing of iParadigms, the developers of Turnitin. The various advantages include:

Enhanced student experience through the consolidation of materials, resources and assessment in Moodle
Streamlined marking, double-marking and feedback processes through multiple marker access to Originality Reports and GradeMark
Adherence to College policy on Anonymous Marking
Multi Part Assignments in support of portfolio submission

Nanogong Audio plug-in

NanoGong is a simple yet powerful audio recording and sharing tool in Moodle. There are two different types of Nanogong activity:

An extended HTML editor which supports voice content. This allows tutors and/or students to augment forum posts, assignments and wikis with audio voice recordings. These can then be shared by all, some or none of the class.
A NanoGong activity which allows students to submit voice messages to their teachers. This is an assessment activity which remains private between tutor and students.

Support for Mac / Safari users

The Moodle Editing bar - for formatting text in discussion fora, assignments, wikis, etc is now available to Mac users who prefer to use Safari. In the past we have advised Mac users to download the Firefox browser but this is not longer necessary.

Happy Moodling in 2011/12!

Moving from Turnitin native to Turnitin Direct integration with Moodle

2011-09-06T14:37:00.002+01:00

Background

Turnitin usage at Royal Holloway, University of London peaked in the academic year 2010/11 with approximately 40 000 submissions to the service. Twenty-one departments currently use Turnitin’s electronic submission and originality checking tools. These figures, when compared to those of 2005/6 when eight departments generated 5000 originality reports, represent a widespread adoption and embedding of the service in the College’s assessment processes. Moodle has played an important part in supporting staff and student access and understanding of Turnitin, having also become a key component of academic life here.

Drivers for change

With such widespread and embedded use of Moodle and Turnitin comes a diversity of user requirements. Some requests are in response to internal changes at Royal Holloway, while some arise from the need to improve the service by aligning it to the needs of Royal Holloway and other UK Higher Education institutions.

The E-Learning Team has worked with the Students’ Union, Student Experience groups, Faculty Teaching Groups and the E-Learning User Advisory Group, as well as those who use and support others in their use of Moodle and Turnitin. The feedback relating to Moodle and Turnitin can be categorised thus:

Access to and consolidation of course materials and activities

Accessing Turnitin can be confusing and is subject to human error.
Students appreciate the consolidation of academic materials and activities in Moodle.
Although the majority of courses now use Moodle, there is real concern that the levels of use vary within and between departments
These of GradeMark – Turnitin’s online marking and feedback system – has plateaued in the last year.

Supporting team-taught courses

Moodle supports a team-based approach to teaching and assessment
Turnitin does not support concurrent access to originality reports – and this has stifled the uptake of GradeMark.
Turnitin does not support double-marking – this has also slowed the uptake of GradeMark

Anonymous submission/marking

Turnitin complies with College regulations on anonymous marking of summative work.
Moodle, as a profile-driven environment underpinned by social-constructivist learning theories, does not easily support anonymity.

Administration

Departmental Administrators have contributed enormously to the uptake of Turnitin.
The registration of users and creation of courses on Turnitin is time-consuming and often duplicates the efforts made to provide Moodle to the same user-base.

Overview of integration module

Turnitin's Moodle integration activity module is a standalone Moodle module with the aim of representing the full suite of Turnitin's features within Moodle. The module was developed with the full support and backing of iParadigms, the developers of Turnitin.

Advantages of integration

Moodle-based

Moodle is widely used, centrally supported and is trusted.
Students, Academics and Administrative staff members are already registered on and familiar with Moodle.
A Moodle course-space for every Banner course already exists.
Student engagement is more readily tracked in Moodle than in Turnitin
Currently dormant Moodle course spaces can be used to increase the use of Moodle, improve the student experience , and to standardise the use of e-learning within and between departments.

Multiple marker access to Originality Reports and GradeMark

Turnitin assignments, when submitted via Moodle, can be viewed by all tutors connected to the course
With concurrent access to assignments, the possibility of double-marking and feedback is realised

Anonymous Marking

Anonymous marking allows student names to be masked from instructors up until after the assignment has been marked and moderated (either on- or offline)
Moodle can now be used as a repository for summative assessment, even for those assignments which have previously not used Turnitin

Multi Part Assignments

Each Turnitin Assignment may consist of up to 5 parts, parts can be configured to have start dates, due dates and post dates independent of one another.
Such additional functionality allows for portfolio-based assignments and draft essays to be easily set-up and submitted

Considerations

In the interests of continuity and consistency, it is suggested that Departmental Administration staff take responsibility for the creation of Turnitin assignments in Moodle.
Departments can use only one model – native Turnitin or Moodle-based access.
Assignments submitted to native Turnitin cannot be accessed via Moodle.
Only the course owner can access those assignments submitted via Moodle in the native Turnitin interface – although there should be no need to do so.
Moodle-based accounts will be in addition to native Turnitin accounts and therefore, existing and active Turnitin accounts will have to be closed down before students submit via Moodle.

Martin King - Senior Learning & Technology Officer @ Royal Holloway, University of London

Analogue Turnitin?

2011-07-21T10:11:00.000+01:00

I almost walked into a door when I saw this padlocked drop-box marked ‘Turnitin Box’. What did it mean? My worst fear was that somehow, somewhere, someone had managed to turn the digital, portable and accessible in to something quite analogue, fixed and 'gatekept'. Were students submitting discs to be uploaded by an Administrator? Was this part of some sort of sampling lottery?

However, I then came across a friendly member of staff who informed me that this is where students deposit hard copies of assignments, after uploading electronic copies to Turnitin, complete with the Paper ID written on the cover sheet.

'Turnitin', it seems, is being used in the Department of Health & Social Care as a byword for the submission process regardless of the media involved. We may have adopted an Americanism, and turned what is now a proper noun back into a verb, but we’ve also embedded the concept and use of Turnitin firmly in the minds of staff and students.

Turnitin: Supporting Multiple Administrators & Markers

2011-05-17T16:56:00.001+01:00

Supporting multiple-administrators-and-markers-in-turnitin

View more documents from Martin King

Terms of Service: Using third party Web 2.0 services in teaching and learning

2011-04-18T17:01:00.000+01:00

Terms of Service: Using third party Web 2.0 services in teaching and learning

Many of the discussions we've had around using or not using institutional VLE's often venture into third party territory, with the insistence that 'students are using it anyway so why shouldn't we put stuff there?'. There are a number of issues which should be considered and addressed before requiring staff to publish materials, encroach upon the extra-academic lives of their students, and abdicate control over their work and online identities. Students may not wish to sign-up to third party services and I've yet to see any College regulations which would insist upon this. Students do not have equal access to the Internet, and this would be compunded by the rise of mobile technologies allowing constant, seamless access to social networking sites.

It may be that a group of students are equipped for and demanding of a web 2.0 approach to teaching and learning, and that his may sway the enthusiastic lecturer. Overcoming issues of access, IT-literacy and even information literacy may be achievable, but what about the terms and Conditions of, let's not forget this, listed companies? The first port of call is rarely the ToS, but a quick tour of Facebook's approximately 20 000 words, using rich jargon and legalese and spread over a number of URLs, Facebook pages and PDFs is both offputting and revealing in (almost) equal measure. These are designed not to be read, or read and understood by the majority of people.

Two of the more accessible yet worrying terms from Facebook's ToS are:

'When you delete IP content, it is deleted in a manner similar to emptying the recycle bin on a computer. However, you understand that removed content may persist in backup copies for a reasonable period of time (but will not be available to others).'

and:

'Even after you remove information from your profile or delete your account, copies of that information may remain viewable elsewhere to the extent it has been shared with others, it was otherwise distributed pursuant to your privacy settings, or it was copied or stored by other users.'

These and other terms of service have serious implications for the reluctant and power user alike, as well as the institutions. It is quite clear why staff and students are often reluctant to engage with, and within, these environments even before looking into the ToS. The ubiquity and popularity of services such as Facebook may be tempting, but the persistence of data and the profit-driven model are at odds with academic practices.

How to create a horrible and ineffective Moodle site

2011-02-24T16:54:00.001Z

Television is one of the greatest inventions ever. It is, however, subject to some very poor decision making on the part of both programme makers and viewers (This explains stuff like Ant & Dec). E-Learning is equally susceptive to this and there are countless researched and anecdotal accounts of poor practice, which give e-learning a bad name. I recently surveyed my Twitter followers and other interested parties as to what they think contributes to a poor user experience in Moodle.

With thanks to Twitter followers: @acastrillejo @marxjohnson @Rob_work @BBarrington @moodleman

Summary of responses

The overwhelming majority of responses related to the poor presentation of courses and the distribution of materials
Some were concerned with poor planning and execution of activities
There were a few examples of disconnects between tutors, students, IT staff
I’ve experienced at first hand almost every single one

Considerations

How many of these issues could be solved by surveying the recipients - the students
Can poor editing tools and over-complicated uploading 'workflows' contribute to poor presentation?
Could an intervention resolve all of these provider-centric errors with by an intervention? e.g., Learning Technology Consultant carrying out a simple demonstration of the user experience
How many of these issues can be explained by a lack of time, support, recognition for e-learning efforts?
Is there a deeper problem to solve?
Is it easier to pick holes presentation than content? Are we guilty of surface rather than deep critique?
As generalists, are Learning technologists incapable of analysing content – and should this be done by critical friends in the same discipline?

Responses

Add resources only in .pdf
Put Files needed for Assignments as separate Resource links, and don't link to them from the Assignments' description
Only use Offline Assignments
Prevent teachers from seeing each others pages
Put all your resources and activites in "Topic 0" at the top of the page
Upload all your resources as Powerpoints
Use a different authentication method from institutional login, preferably one involving hard to remember usernames
No section headings
List of links with un-useful names (eg: website; powerpoint 1)
Broken links
Loadsa blocks!
Focus on the tool instead of making it pedagogically relevant.
Make it a static repository with no real interaction
Use the back-to-front theme that Moodle.org uses on April Fools Day, totally unusable!
Put your live site into developer debug mode

Plagiarism checking or chequing?

2011-01-21T17:05:00.001Z

For under $5 students can check their own work on the Turnitin US site before submitting to their University's account. To the cynical student (and suspicious academic) this offers unsupported and asymmetric access to reports, encourages a mechanistic approach to writing, undermines the deterrent and detection effects of Turnitin, and supports attempts to disguise plagiarism rather than avoiding it.

There is no reason to suspect that this is an essay harvesting exercise, as is the case with other 'checking services'. The submitted essays are not added to the Global database, students' subsequent submissions are not then compared with the 'original', and no such matches are flagged-up.

Should the 200+ UK HE customers aim to address this? Are HEs driving their students to this by not supporting them adequately with academic skills support?

Communicating with Students in Moodle

2011-01-19T15:59:00.000Z

A brief paper outlining and advising on the two main approaches to communicating with students, and encouraging students to communicate with one another; Forums and Messaging

http://tiny.cc/MoodleComms

Create a Customised Group Layout to Keep Your Students on Topic

2010-11-17T11:25:00.006Z

I was approached by the course convener of a first year Drama course requesting whether they could have separate Moodle course spaces for the six groups in this course. Initial thoughts on the practicality of dividing a course in this way worried me. Our student enrolment system automatically places students in a single course space for each course code, so in this case breaking from single to multiple courses, students would be faced with enrolling themselves on the correct group course space, with the department and Moodle team shouldering an added administrative burden. In addition we would have six extra courses to manage that were not integrated into college systems. Following some considerable head scratching I decided to work towards a means by which students could select their group from a list in the current course space. Each link would need to display only content and resources relating to the group selected by the student.

After some experimentation I found it was possible to configure a course web address (URL) that would force the course page to display the course in collapsed view (allows only one topic or week to be displayed), along with a specific single topic. Provided all the content for a group is placed in a single topic area this would meet their needs.

The URL to create this view type is obtained by simply appending &topic=# to the end of the course address where # is the topic number. So the URL to show topic four only along with the course main content would be;

http://moodle.uni.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=101&topic=4

The course code (Example - http://moodle.uni.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=101) can be copied from the top of your course page, then add &topic=4 to the end of this to influence how the course is displayed.

Here are instructions to create a table of links.

Go to the course and copy the course URL from the address displayed
Turn editing on, then click on the edit icon for the course main topic area (Topic 0)
Create a table with a single row for each group and a title to go along side your existing course wide resources and information. (see image below)
Populate the table with title and group names
Now carefully select the text for your first group then click on the Insert web link button
Enter the URL for the course copied in step 1, adding &topic=# to the end to point to the required topic number. In the Target field select Same Window from the options then click OK
Repeat steps 5 and 6 for each of your groups
Click Save changes to finish and test the table links

Screenshot of the group selection table produced

Some compromises and strategies are required by the tutors so that each week is clearly defined within the single topic area, with resources and activities displayed with the relevant week to reflect the standard Moodle course layout. This is done by creating a label with the title for each week, thus making it possible to group resources and activities to the information for a given week. Creation of addition course web pages from the add a resources options is also recommended to reduce blocks of text.

I hope this will be of use to you, and do contact us with any questions.

Turnitin: Investigation into Student Access to Originality Reports in UK HE

2010-11-04T17:59:00.004Z

An investigation into the use of Turnitin in UK HE institutions, focusing upon student access to the service; are students permitted to interact with Turnitin; is access to the Originality Reports denied or allowed, what sort of access is supported, what are the reasons behind these decisions, and what are the outcomes?

http://tiny.cc/Turnitin-Survey

Turnitin: Student Access to Originality Reports by Martin King is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Based on a work at rhul-lt.blogspot.com.

Moodle News @ Royal Holloway

2010-09-24T16:46:00.002+01:00

Moodle VLE (http://moodle.rhul.ac.uk) Build: moodle 1.9.8

User and Enrolment Full Synchronisation

All Moodle user profiles are synchronised with Active Directory each day at 19:00
All enrolments are synchronised with Banner at 20:00
This should ensure that course participant lists are up to date with students as listed in Banner each day.

New Theme Includes Styling to Improve Usability and Match New Web Brand

Header changed from Campus Connect brand to new web brand
Styling of content headers changed to improve usability.
Front page text and blocks adjusted to improve access to support information.

New Book Module

Book module installed and available in courses via the Activities dropdown.

New Study Skills for Campus (S4C) Block

This block allows the inclusion of a link to purchased Study Skills for Campus material from a course including single sign on.

New Repository Module

Equella module installed that allows searching and embedding of resources from collections in the new institutional repository (digirep.rhul.ac.uk) and available in courses via the Resource dropdown.

Turnitin News

2010-09-24T16:27:00.004+01:00

Turnitin2 Launched on Sep 5th

Benefits of Turnitin2

Fully-formatted student assignments: Feedback is layered in a single, consistent, fully-formatted view of the student paper (including footnotes, style and images) at every step in the process of evaluation and grading.
Integration of all tools: Turnitin2 provides all the tools needed to evaluate students' written work, all in one place. A single, common view of students' assignments. Everything is “right there,” saving time and improving productivity
Layering of Originality Reports and Grademark environments: Users can simultaneously view superimposed layers of rich feedback provided by originality checking, by instructors, enhancing insight and understanding.
'Go back' option: Some people may need more time to adjust to these improvements, so we have enabled users to easily "go back" to the pre-Turnitin2 versions of the Originality Report and GradeMark.

Find out more about Turnitin 2 - http://tiny.cc/turnitin-staff enrolment key: parity

E-Learning themes

2010-05-26T13:30:00.007+01:00

Themes with which we can approach the:

    • re-design of the website

    • development of Moodle support course-space, help-sheets, case studies

    • focus of e-learning development/training sessions

    • various committees

Some ideas - to which you are invited to add, expand upon, question and critique

Teaching Large groups

    • Audience Response Systems

    • Moodle Groups tools

    • Moodle Fora/Wikis

    • Online submission of formative assessment

    • Peer-marking in Moodle Wikis/Fora or in Turnitin’s Peermark tool

Feedback & Assessment
    • Audience Response Systems

    • Audio feedback (generic for whole group on specific assignments)

    • Video feedback

    • Online quizzes/tests/assignments in Moodle

    • Gradebook online distributed marking in Turnitin

    • Use of Twitter and other social media to support feed-forward and feedback

    • Peer-marking in Moodle Wikis/Fora or in Turnitin’s Peermark tool

Employability

    • Working in virtual groups – Moodle Fora/Wikis

    • Advanced use of IT

    • Social Media

    • Information Literacy

Academic integrity

    • Integrated use of Plagiarism resources in Moodle

    • Customisation & development of Moodle-based resources

    • Joint-approach to issue with EDT/ADT and Faculties

Blended Learning Workload

2010-05-26T10:32:00.007+01:00

A recent posting to the ALT list enquires about

'specific information on how the (traditional not distance) Universities and Colleges you work at or know of deal with the issue of 'officially' recognising the time that teachers put online in a blended learning context'

and asks:

'Are there any reports that you are aware of that shows how 'online contact' with students by teachers is recognised as part of their teaching duties in a blended learning context? Do you use workload calculators , for example, or do you integrate your online tutoring to specific lesson plans which are approved?'

This is an issue which must be addressed, especially in research-led institutions, if meaningful online interactivity is to become established and sustained.

Any ideas, experiences or resources out there?

The Moodle Groups tool

2010-05-25T16:50:00.008+01:00

Background

Against a backdrop of reduced resources, great and sometimes conflicting demands are being made of Higher Education institutions. Research into H.E. in the UK indicates that, since the 1980’s, Universities are operating with continually decreased resources; student numbers have increased, large group teaching has become the norm in many institutions and disciplines, and that there is a much increased student-to-staff ratio. (Gibbs et al, 1996; Gibbs, 2006; Hounsell, 2007)

Students require rapid and timely feedback (Yorke 2007, Yorke 2005, Scheeler et al 2006) while the Leitch Review (2006) asserts the need for H.E. to provide transferable skills for the ‘information economy’; that Information Technology, Knowledge Management, and virtual collaborative working skills can contribute to graduate employability.

How can already established technologies meet these demands?

Moodle allows for participants in any course space to be easily deployed into smaller groups. Using the Groups tool, a cohort may be divided according to tutor, seminar, subject, or project groups. The number or size of groups is unlimited, and membership is not restricted to a single group within a course.

The most effective use of the Groups tool is in conjunction with the Forum, Wiki or Assignment activities. Only a single instance of an activity needs to be created, not one for each group, so course development for group activities is rapid.

For example:

A course delivered by six tutors requires the cohort of 180 students to submit an online assignment in Moodle. Each tutor is responsible for the marking and feedback of assignments for 30 students. With the Groups tool, students are automatically deployed to six groups, while the tutors are assigned manually. Only a single instance of the Assignment activity is created, streamlining both the set-up of the assignment and the distribution of marking.

Moodle offers great flexibility when setting up groups:

Visible groups – students can view other groups’ activities but cannot participate in them

Separate groups – students have no access to other groups’ activities. Each groups works in private

Automated population – groups can be set up to automatically add students to them, upon their first log-in to Moodle

Control of number/size of groups – the larger group can be divided into a specific number of groups, or groups of a pre-determined size
What are the main advantages of small group work supported by Moodle?

Dividing a large cohort into smaller groups has a number of advantages;

For students

    * Affords opportunities to work more closely together
    * Encourages participation by overcoming location, outside commitments or group dynamics
    * Is less reliant upon face-to-face meetings
    * Peer review within groups, both formal and informal
    * Streamlines production of output; a single shared and editable document rather than multiple copies owned by each student

For tutors

    * Ease of allocation of marking; supports multiple markers/tutors
    * Ability to monitor and provide feedback on group progress
    * Marks can be allocated to the Group and its members
    * Flexible control over groups visibility of other groups’ activities
    * Can be used to provide access to a particular resource to a subset of students

Examples of the Moodle Groups tool

Forums

    * Allowing students to work privately in small groups
    * Posting group meeting minutes
    * Sharing and editing output documents
    * Sharing files, links and other resources
    * Extend discussions before or after face-to-face meetings
    * Ease of tracking and marking group/student performance

Wikis

    * Wikis perform better, both pedagogically and technically, when used in small groups
    * Producing a collaborative document; annotating text, adding links and comments, creating and sharing interactive media
    * Allowing students to work privately in groups to produce an output file which can then be shared with whole cohort after marking
    * Ease of tracking and marking group/student performance

Assignments

    * Tutors can easily view submissions, feedback and grade group by group
    * Tutors can be assigned to a group – and receive notifications only of submissions of that group
    * Multiple files of both individual and group submissions can be viewed
    * Used to give feedback and grades for offline activities such as presentations – marks can be aggregated with those from other activities e.g. quizzes

E-Learning presentations from the RHUL Learning At Work Day

2010-05-25T11:57:00.004+01:00

Audience response systems

Twitter in academia; an introduction

Social Bookmarking

Ring-fencing of marks to encourage good academic practice?

2010-05-18T14:19:00.007+01:00

As a Learning Technologist with a special interest in e-assessment, as well as the responsibility of administering and promoting Turnitin, I've been thinking about the potential of ring-fenced marks in assessments to promote awareness and understanding of the benefits of academic referencing and presentation.

Rather than simply telling students to reference and format their submissions properly, and then subtracting marks for failure to do so, why not ring-fence 5-10% of the mark for good academic practice? Given that many students are motivated by marks, this approach may help develop understanding and appreciation of academic referencing, and the various support mechanisms offered to but often ignored by students who most need them.

One cause for concern may be that poor students could pass an assignment with only 30% for content and the full 10% for academic practice. This would be symptomatic of a rather crude approach to credit, while a poor student is unlikely to perform well in either content or referencing. Perhaps a bonus mark based on the performance on the content part of the assessment could be awarded for academic practice; 60% plus 10% of that would generate 66%, 30% plus 10% of that would generate only 33%.

Does anyone have any experience of, or views on this particular approach?

Turnitin and staff support

2010-04-22T14:59:00.003+01:00

Royal Holloway, University of London has been using Turnitin for a few years, with every faculty and department now making widespread use of it. Our users are becoming increasingly adept at interpreting and analysing the originality reports and are now making quite sophisticated demands of both the software and those who support it.

I have two broad questions to which I hope some of you can relate and respond:

1. What strategies do you have for dealing with large student groups, say >300? Where the task of viewing every report is simply overwhelming and unworkable, given the need to provide timely and meaningful feedback to our students. Any equity achieved through use of Turnitin is negated if the reports are not referred to or only partially checked by an academic.

My ideas to deal with this include:

Advising that tutors inspect all the blue (0% similarity), yellow, orange and red (25-100%) report bands, while taking a sample of the green band reports - which account for 80% of our student reports. I maintain that it would be inappropriate to suggest a specific percentage below which the report should be ignored, or above which secondary action should be taken, due to the diversity of assignments and students - but there has to be some sort of 'informed threshold', albeit one currently dictated by Turnitin's own banding system.

I have suggested to Turnitin through the channels provided by Northumbria Learning that, in the Inbox view, the Similarity Index could be augmented with the number of resources with which a student submission has similarity. For example 20% similarity from (20 resources) or 18% (2 resources) - two similarly ranked reports with very different attributes you will agree. This would make it quicker to order the inbox and scan the headline data without having to look at every report.

2. How would you approach the analysis of a group of students, say Y1 students as they progress through to Y3, to see the effects of Turnitin?

This is tricky because groups change, we use anonymity, and because there are so many factors which dictate the average similarity index for a department, class or assignment. Factors such as the diversity of the assignments, the students' developing and improving research skills, and Turnitin's growing database. Has anyone used Turnitin to examine this?

I would welcome your comments, ideas and experiences you may wish to share.

Twitter ye now

2009-02-04T15:05:00.006Z

What is Twitter?

Twitter can be described as a hybrid of blogging and SMS messaging, or a severely cut-down version of Facebook.

Twitter asks its users – Twitterers - “What are you doing?” and provides a limit of 140 characters in which to answer, with what is known as a ‘Tweet’. Users can reply to this question and to the posts of others either by visiting the site or by SMS text. Updates can be received this way too and by RSS (Really Simple Syndication). This is similar to the Facebook status updates but with the ability to reply directly to the user, a feature Facebook has recently added to its interface.

Twitter offers many benefits:

• it’s a very simple way to keep in touch with friends, colleagues, cohorts, customers and users
• it’s a very direct, open and efficient way of reporting on conferences or projects
• it offers powerful privacy settings; users can open their ‘tweets’ to ‘twitterers’ of their choosing
• it can support communities of practice
• it supports ‘metacognition’ – the practice of thinking and reflecting upon learning
• because of the SMS-like limitations on length but a very public display, it forces twitterers to be brief and to the point - an important skill in thinking and communicating clearly.

Prominent users include:

• The BBC which has started using Twitter to disseminate breaking news
• Stephen Fry keeps in touch with over 116 000 fellow twitterers
• Barack Obama, who used Twitter as a publicity mechanism on his way to winning the US Presidential election
• The University of Texas at San Antonio College of Engineering, which is using Twitter to relay information to students.

Further reading

This message summarises the information bookmarked at the following link:

http://delicious.com/Martin_King/twitter

Clickers - updated webpage and case study

2008-12-04T13:05:00.005Z

Please find updated information on clickers / Audience Response Systems here:
http://www.rhul.ac.uk/registry/educational-development/e-learning/technologies/clickers/clickers-overview.html

A case study of the use of clickers in Psychology lectures has also been published online:
http://www.rhul.ac.uk/registry/educational-development/e-learning/case-studies/case-study-clickers.pdf

Credits
Martin King
David Thurlby
Polly Dalton

Interactive Lecturing Tool - Clickers

2008-08-15T11:21:00.003+01:00

Nowadays the PowerPoint presentation has, at long last, completely replaced the overhead projector in the role of communicating text and images to a large group of students in support of a lecture. PowerPoint allows us to draw upon and incorporate endless media types. Showing websites, video clips and animations to support and enhance our teaching is common place. However involving each and every student in a way that allows the tutor to test their learning and draw on student experiences is still challenging. It is in this area that clickers, or more precisely, Audience Response Systems (ARS) can revolutionise the way we communicate with students in this setting.

Lecturers can test understanding by asking students questions. This may be to a single student or via a show of hands to gain a consensus of opinion. With clickers each student is issued with a radio transmitting keypad before the lecture and each and every student can use it to respond to questions from the lecturer by selecting their answers from a range of prepared answers created within PowerPoint via the pad. These responses could be a simple yes/No, agree/disagree, or offer multiple choice style answers. A read out is displayed during voting so the lecturer can make sure every student has responded and can then close the voting. Results are displayed in the PowerPoint slide. The results are shown instantly, via a choice of graph layouts and show an exact set of results that the lecturer can use to gauge understanding or opinion, and can then redirect, review, or carry on the direction of the lecture based on this. The crucial difference here is that all students are interacting and feel more engaged with the lecture.

It doesn’t end there, if used to gain information from the students about their opinions and experiences this data can then be made available via Moodle afterwards, for further research and study following the lecture. From case studies I have seen, some universities have required students to purchase their own response pad before they commence their study. This allows the pad to be registered to a particular student so a name list could be viewed with each response. It has also been used to register attendance.

More information is available from the manufacturers of the response system via these links
http://turningpointuniversities.co.uk/index.html
http://www.turningtechnologies.com/highereducationinteractivelearning.cfm

We’re interested in hearing from you via this blog if you
- Have seen or used an audience response system used in an interesting and innovative way
- Wish to use an ARS in the future and want to find out more.
- Links or documents you have found helpful relating to this topic.
- Any comments

Definition of e-learning

2008-07-16T15:43:00.004+01:00

This week's post requires a little more participation than usual......

Can you navigate to the blog and use the comments feature for this post to share your own definition of e-learning; What is e-learning? what does it require? what does it deliver?

At the risk of skewing this activity I will provide my own off-the-cuff general definition of e-learning.

A broad range of activities and interactions, underpinned by information and/or audio visual technologies, which facilitate, support and enhance the learning processes and experiences of the participants.

Using del.icio.us to capture, organise, share and retrieve web-based resources

2008-06-17T23:37:00.001+01:00

Del.icio.us is a free, web-based service allowing users to bookmark sites and, rather than keep them in a particular pc and browser, share them online with friends, colleagues, and people with similar or overlapping interests.

my del.icio.us bookmarks

Annotated Screenshot

Captions

1. Title of webpage/website: This is by default defined by the page creator. Most websites are helpfully titled (the BBC, Times Higher Education and the Guardian are good examples). Some academic/personal pages may not be so usefully titled, but this can be changed when saving the page to your del.icio.us files.

2. When saved: Useful to know when you originally found the webpage, especially if you save and then read later.

3. User-defined tags: When saving a page, the user can add ‘tags’ to it which will make it easier to organise, retrieve and share pages between browsers, pcs, colleagues and the del.icio.us community. Rather than bookmarking in a browser you can bookmark on line and send your reading lists, resources and (small r) research to those who are intersted.

4. How many others have saved page: This provides an insight into how the webpage is perceived by others…how many people also thought it was useful? Who exactly has saved it? Clicking on the link shows who else has saved it and any comments they added to their tags. This is useful in adding ‘authority’ to a webpage.

Getting started

This is a good place to begin, my own bookmarked resource on using del.icio.us! - http://del.icio.us/edc_rhul/getting-started-with-del.icio.us