Tag Archives: Assessment

Turnitin Webcast – Building Effective Peer Review Assignments

Assessment, Copyright, Plagiarism, Turnitin, , ,

Turnitin Webcast – Building Effective Peer Review Assignments

The latest Turnitin Webcast, entitled, “Building Effective Peer Review Assignments” is being held next Thursday (20th November) at 21.00 (GMT). Members of the Turnitin Professional Development Team (Education Manager Kristin Brabec and Education Director Jason Chu) will provide an overview of how to use Turnitin to create effective peer review assignments. To join in with this Webcast visit the following web site:

http://go.turnitin.com/webcast/to-share-or-not-to-share

Again, a shiny ‘Certificate of Participation’ will be provided to attendees of the Webcast.

Exceptions – Assessment Settings for AAA students

Assessment, Succeed, ,

A new guide has been produced explaining how to implement ‘Exceptions’ in the settings of online assessments in Succeed. The most common use of this would be to allow students who have an alternative assessment method set up and recorded in their Agreed Record of University Adjustments (ARUA), also often referred to as the Agreed Academic Arrangements (AAA), to have longer time to sit an online exam paper. These exception settings on assessments in Succeed get round the old problem of having to set up multiple versions of an assessment to cater for all students with different types of AAA.

http://www.stir.ac.uk/media/schools/is/documents/succeeddocuments/exceptions.pdf

The guide assumes assessments have already been set up and deployed to the relevant place in the Succeed module and that the identities of the students in question are known at the outset of the process.

Item Analysis and View All Attempts – Time Taken not shown problem

Assessment, Succeed, ,

There is a problem with the ‘Item Analysis’ and ‘View All Attempts’ features in the Grade Centre in Succeed. If you run an Item Analysis or View All Attempts for an assessment, the average time taken by the users is not displayed.

Item Analyses are supposed to show you lots of useful stats about your assessment, such as how many people took it, average score, the ‘difficulty’ of each question etc. It’s also supposed to show you how long, on average, students took to do the assessment. This is the bit that’s not working, however. The average time is displayed as a very low number, often 00 hours and 00 minutes. Also, if you try to ‘View All Attempts’ for an assessment from the relevant column in the Grade Centre the duration is not shown through that method either. A report is produced with columns for Last Name, First Name, Username, Grade, Attempt Number, Date, Status and also a column for ‘Duration’. But whereas all the other columns are populated with data, the Duration column is empty. So you cannot find out how long students took via this method either.

The only way you can find out how long students took to complete an assessment is currently to view each student’s submission individually and look at their ‘Test Information’. This will tell you how long they took, but if you have a lot of students this will be time consuming.

This issue has been reported to Blackboard and they have acknowledged it as a ‘Known Issue. there is currently no patch we can install to fix this and it will be targeted for being mended in the April 2015 Release (which we may not upgrade to until some time after April 2015).

Teaching Bites – Quizzes and Surveys

Assessment, Electronic Marking, Succeed, Teaching Bites, , ,

This week we ran a Teaching Bites session on Quizzes and Surveys in Succeed. If you want to see what was discussed you may watch the presentation at the Teaching Bites Listen Again page:

http://listenagain.stir.ac.uk/media/keep/tbites/listenagain.php

Future Teaching Bites sessions will be added to this page. There’s also further information on all the Teaching Bites sessions, including supporting materials, in the ‘Learning and Development – My Learning’ course area in Succeed. In this course navigate to:

> Course Content > IT & Information Skills > Teaching Bites

…to find all the information you need.

How much do we use Turnitin?

Assessment, Electronic Marking, Plagiarism, Succeed, Turnitin, , , ,

Here are the University of Stirling statistics for use of Turnitin services (Turnitin, PeerMark and GradeMark) in the period February 2013 through to February 2014:

  • Total student submissions to Turnitin: 48,816
  • Submissions marked using PeerMark: 674
  • Submissions marked using GradeMark: 1,126

The University’s current Turnitin licence allows us to have up to 10% of our submissions graded using GradeMark with no extra cost to the university. At the current usage levels we could grade another three and a half thousand submissions via GradeMark without breaching our licence. So if you are interested in getting to grips with using GradeMark, watch Turnitin’s GradeMark demo video:

http://vimeo.com/30517572

…and then get in touch with your eLD representative to get started:

http://www.stir.ac.uk/is/staff/about/teams/aldt/#eld

Test Access Log

Succeed, , ,

A useful new feature in Succeed is the Test Access Log. This allows an instructor  to determine whether a student run into problems during a test.  Previously it was very difficult to verify reports of problems during a test but the Test Access Log provides detailed information on the student’s interactions. For full details see the Blackboard help pages:

https://help.blackboard.com/en-us/Learn/9.1_SP_12_and_SP_13/Instructor/000_Product_Updates/SP13_New_Features/Test_Access_Log