Monthly Archives: March 2014

Teaching Bites – Quizzes and Surveys

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.

Teaching Bites II

The next set of teaching bites are detailed below. They will all be in S10.

To sign-up go into Succeed and then to Learning & Development – My Learning, IT & Information Skills, Succeed Training. Also don’t forget to bring along your sandwiches!

These sessions will be available to remote campuses. To register for remote access please email Simon Booth.

2nd April: 12.00-13.00: Discussion Tool, Blogs and Wikis

This session will look at some of the collaboration tools within blackboard, these tools can be used to help build a sense of community in modules, can be used for group working, social interaction and the exchange of ideas.  The session will look at the discussion tool, blogs and wikis and give examples of where these might be used successfully within your succeed module.

9th April: 12.00-13.00: Turnitin

Turnitin offers much more than plagiarism detection. It has tools to facilitate peer marking (see Teaching Bites 23-April) and online marking (‘GradeMark’). This talk will demonstrate how to use GradeMark and discuss the positive and negative features of marking online.

 16th April: 12.00-13.00: Video (Listen Again, Lecture Capture, Screen casting)

This session will look at the tools available to allow you to incorporate video into your teaching at the University. These will include the Listen Again lecture recording service, producing video and audio podcasts, incorporating You Tube material into Succeed, using the ‘video everywhere’ tool  in Succeed, and recording and using material from TV and films.

23rd April: 12.00-13.00: Peer Marking

This session will  evaluate the use of an on-line peer/self-review tool (‘PeerMark’) available through the Turnitin.  Peermark distributes students’ work automatically,  allows the tutor to set feedback questions and word limits, and enables students to review each other’s work anonymously. Through  consideration of a recent case study, the preparation required for peer review, and the benefits and challenges will be reviewed. The session will demonstrate how to get started and some tips on its use.

 30th April: 12.00-13.00: Mind Genius – cancelled

This session will look at the software ‘Mind Genius. Mind Genius is mind mapping software that helps you capture, visualize and manage your ideas and information.  Mind Genius can be a useful tool for:

  •  Preparing  and planning essays and reports
  • Preparing presentations
  • Managing tasks
  • Brainstorm for innovation and generating new ideas
  • Plan strategies, projects, events, tasks & workload
  • Rapidly gather project requirements, risks, constraints & dependencies
  • Capturing the conversation and actions during meetings

 7th May: EDUFair (The University of Stirling’s annual learning and teaching conference)

14th May: 12.00-13.00: Resource lists – smarter working with your reading list!

The Aspire resource lists are dynamic so they tell the students where in the library a book is located.  Worried that the students are not reading key papers? Check the stats using the Aspire Dashboard feature.

21st May: 12.00-13.00: Copyright

Fundamentals of copyright for teaching and learning. In this teaching bites session we’ll help you to comply with UK copyright and point you towards the things the library can do to help.

How much do we use 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

EduFair 2014

The University of Stirling’s annual learning and teaching conference, EduFair, is taking place on Wednesday, 7th May in the Pathfoot Building of the Stirling Campus. This year’s theme is, ‘Developing and Supporting the Curriculum’.

If you wish to find out more details of this event, register to attend or even submit a presentation, please see the event web site at:

http://www.strategicplanning.stir.ac.uk/CAPL/ed-dev/courses-and-workshops/

Turnitin Now Accepts More File Types

The plagiarism detection/awareness-raising service Turnitin will now accept more file types as student submissions. As well as the previously-available, text-based submission types (Word documents, PDF files, text files), Turnitin will now accept PowerPoint presentations, spreadsheets, images, HTML code, even audio and video.

Whist Turnitin will not be able to run a text-for-text plagiarism check on, say, a submitted audio file, it will store that file associated with that student, and allow staff to make use of the GradeMark or PeerMark features in Turnitin to assess the submission.

More details on the new file types that can be accepted, plus some examples of how Turnitin and GradeMark can be used to assess submissions are available on this ‘Grade Anything’ page on the Turnitin web site:

http://www.turnitin.com/en_us/features/grade-anything

If you want to find out more, there’s a live Turnitin web cast you can join at 6pm (GMT) on Thursday, 10th April 2014. You need to sign up to attend, and the sign up form is here:

http://pages.turnitin.com/WC_140410_register.html

New Help Page for Students using Blackboard Collaborate

A new page has been created on the Information Services (IS) web site to provide students with information on the peer-to-peer communication tool Blackboard Collaborate:

http://www.stir.ac.uk/is/student/it/software/blackboardcollaborate/

If you have students who use Blackboard Collaborate you may want to alert them to this page. It contains a guide to using the package, and also links to the Collaborate web site where users can run tests to check they have a compatible browser and a compatible version of Java installed before trying to run the software.

New Guidance on Using Images

The Intellectual Property Office, the official government body responsible for Intellectual Property (IP) rights in the United Kingdom, has just updated its Copyright Notice regarding digital images, photographs and the internet. This excellent new guidance document helps users to understand copyright basics regarding images. It covers topics such as who owns the copyright for an image, when you require permission to use an image and the issues you need to be aware of if you wish to use images in your teaching which you may have found on the internet, taken on your camera phone or been sent by a friend or colleague. It’s an invaluable resource to make sure you stay on the right side of the law when using images.

http://www.ipo.gov.uk/c-notice-201401.pdf

Help Blackboard improve Succeed

Blackboard, the company that makes Succeed, is openly looking for suggestions to help it improve the product. It is encouraging users of Blackboard Learn (which is the product we call ‘Succeed’ here at the University of Stirling) to submit requests and suggestions for improvements via its ‘Product Enhancement Request’ page. At a recent meeting of the Scottish Blackboard Users’ Group (Scot-BUG) in Aberdeen, the regional Client Manager and Account Director were stressing the importance of suggestions from the user community and reiterating the influence such suggestions have had in the past in guiding the development of the product, so please don’t be shy in coming forward.

Product Enhancement Requests may be made by completing this online form:
http://www.blackboard.com/Contact-Us/Feedback/Suggest-Product-Enhancements/For-Learn.aspx

The sorts of requests which are being sought after here are specific suggestions, rather than vague notions. So a targeted suggestion such as, ‘allow the Grade Centre view to be boosted up to full screen to allow more working space whilst using the Grade Centre’ is probably going to have more currency than an amorphous proposition such as, ‘make the Grade Centre easier to use’.

When completing the form, please give as much detail as possible to the developers at Blackboard. You could, for example, take screen shots of the existing situation in the product to accompany your suggestion of how it could be improved, and save these screen shots into a Word document which you could then upload to accompany your request. The clearer you can be about the nature of your suggestion, the easier it will be for the developers to understand it and see it if it possible to implement.

When completing the form, if you are unsure what to select at the ‘What capability does this suggestion relate to?’ pull down menu, select ‘Course Delivery/Management’. At the ‘What product does this suggestion relate to?’ pull down menu you need to select ‘Blackboard Learn’ and our version number is ‘9.1’.

Important: This is a suggestions forum, not a fault-reporting mechanism! If you find things not working in Succeed, please contact your eLD representative or the Information Centre. This form is for suggestions to Blackboard of improvements or efficiencies in the Blackboard Learn (Succeed) product.

Teaching Bites

We have organised a series of 1 hour lunchtime sessions on various features of Succeed. The first three are:

12th March: 12.00-13.00: Module Design — Make Your Succeed a Better Place
Building a module in Succeed where the content is easy for the students to navigate is not as straight-forward as it might first appear. This session looks at some easy wins:

  • Using Content Areas affectively
  • Naming Content and the Description area
  • Use of the Table of Content (left-hand menu/navigation)
  • Consistency

19th March: 12.00-13.00: Blackboard Collaborate (Succeed Classroom)
This session will look at the peer-to-peer Conferencing tool Blackboard Collaborate (Succeed Classroom) and how you may use this in your teaching. Collaborate allows a meeting or teaching session to take place online, with audio, video and a working whiteboard area which can be used to share slides, work collaboratively on documents or conduct a web tour. The session will cover the equipment needed to run a Blackboard Collaborate session, how to set a session up, get started and some tips and tricks on its use.

 26th March: 12.00-13.00: Quizzes/Surveys
The session will look at the Tests, Surveys and Pools area of Succeed. Users will be shown how to set up a test or a survey and how to add questions to it. An explanation of the available question types will be given. The session will also cover how to edit the settings for a test or survey so it is made available to the relevant users at the relevant time, including how to set up exceptions for AAA students who require more time to complete their assessments. An explanation will also be given of the question pool, and how to add questions to this pool, and how to select questions from the pool to add to tests and surveys.

To sign-up go into Succeed and then to Learning & Development – My Learning, IT & Information Skills, Succeed Training. Also don’t forget to bring along your sandwiches!

These sessions will be available to remote campuses. To register for remote access please email Simon Booth.

Respondus Lockdown Browser Demonstration

We are running a campus wide trial through to April 30 of a product called Respondus Lockdown Browser.

Lockdown browser is a custom browser that locks down the testing environment within Blackboard (Succeed). When students use Respondus LockDown Browser they are unable to print, copy, go to another URL, or access other applications. When an assessment is started, students are locked into it until they submit it for grading. Available for both Windows and Mac.

Demo movies are available on the Respondus website : https://www.respondus.com/products/lockdown-browser/demos.shtml

The software will be demonstrated in Cottrell : 2Y5 on Friday 7th March, from 12-12.45.   The demonstration will include using Lockdown browser to access a test – if you wish to attend and participate then please email sarah.grayston@stir.ac.uk