Category Archives: Succeed

Succeed April 2014 Release

Assessment, Electronic Marking, Succeed

For staff there is a significant new feature: Student Preview. Those of you with long memories will recall this feature in WebCT. It has finally made it into Succeed! This gives a complete student view of a module to an instructor. Full details are available here. The icon to start Student Preview is next to the edit on/off (circled in the image below)

Student Preview

Other new features are Anonymous and Delegated Grading when using the Succeed assignment tool  — anonymous grading is already available when using Turnitin but not delegated grading.  Learn more about anonymous grading here and delegated grading here. In a perfect world, Turnitin would be integrated into the Succeed assignment tool and not a separate tool but the world isn’t perfect.

The majority of the changes are more technical, for instance the need to have an Apache web server has been dropped which improves  the performance of the system and should simplify its management. Also frames have been replaced by divs and iFrames (I did say technical!) which improves accessibility for users of screen readers and in the future will facilitate improvements to make the interface work better on smart phones and tablets. Some of the improvements were demonstrated at the BbWorld 2014 (Blackboard Conference) and have generated many positive comments on various email lists about the proposed new UI (user interface) being much slicker. The downside is that we won’t see these improvements at Stirling (assuming they make it into the product) until summer 2015.

Tips to tidy up your My Courses list in Succeed

Succeed

Here are a couple of tips to help you tidy up your Course Listing in Succeed. You may find your ‘My Courses’ list is getting quite long. You can do the following couple of things to make this easier to navigate:

1) Turn off the list of Instructors/Announcements
Succeed shows you a list of people who are Instructors for a module, and previews of Announcements in that module. If you don’t need to see these you can hide them. The effect is to close up the gaps between courses in your listing. Here’s a Before and After shot:

Before and After - My Succeed

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

To do this click the icon at the right hand end of the top of your ‘My Courses’ panel header:

My Courses link

 

 

All your courses are then listed on the next page. Alongside each course are some check boxes, one each for ‘Course Name’ (leave this selected, otherwise you won’t be able to see your course!), ‘Course ID’ (off by default and you have no need to show it), ‘Instructors’, ‘Announcements’ and ‘Tasks’. Merely remove the ticks in the check boxes to hide the Instructors and/or Announcements for the relevant modules. Scroll to the foot of the page and click ‘Submit’ to update your changes.

Community and Content

Succeed

On Monday 23rd June, Succeed was updated with a new licence that exposes two of Succeed’s additional features: Community and Content.

Community will allow panels to be targeted a groups in Succeed, as a simple example the MEQ panel that everybody has been seeing will be visible only to students. The same principle applies to tabs like My Succeed, additional tabs can be added to Succeed and released to particular groups — the challenge here will be obtaining and maintaining the group membership. Expect to see new tabs for Library Resources and Careers in the near future. Community also brings a feature called Organisations, these are similar to modules but provided with the idea of supporting a community of individuals not taking a course. Thus academic content can be keep separate from non-academic — just like there is a My Courses Panel there will be a My Organisations — once we have some organisations set up (this panel is available via Add Panel but currently empty)!

Content exposes all the features of the content system in Succeed. Instead of a Files link in the Control Panel:

Succeed - FilesThere is a Content Collection allowing access to all the courses areas you are an instructor in thus making it easier to move content between different courses (modules) in Succeed. All Organisations also appears here allowing the movement of content between Courses and Organisations. Finally, in this view, there is an area for Institution Content for University level content.

Succeed - Content Collection The Content system is also required to use the new ePortfolio’s feature in the next release of Succeed. We are currently evaluating the new release and its new features — watch out for updates.

Using Succeed on your Mobile – Blackboard Survey

Mobile, Succeed,

The makers of Succeed, Blackboard, are running a survey to try and get some feedback from the user community on how often and in what ways users (both academic staff and students) make use of the mobile version of their Learn system (‘Learn’ is what we call ‘succeed here at the university of Stirling). If you would like to participate in this survey and add your views, please complete it here:

https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/K8D5SRK

Teaching Bites: Final Two Sessions

Copyright, Resource Lists, Succeed, Teaching Bites

There are still two teaching bites and some places remain on both. The sessions will be head in S10 starting at 12.00.

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.

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.

Semesters in Succeed

Documentation, Succeed

The terms feature has recently been switched on in Succeed and modules that are associated with terms (i.e. all current modules will either be in Spring 2014 or Academic Year 2013/14) have been allocated to that semester. Members of eLD can modify the setting if required.

Terms can be used to organise the My Course panels on the My Succeed page. If you are managing a large number of modules, terms should really help as you can group modules into terms (and hide terms from being displayed).

eLD has written a short guide to using the terms feature in Succeed and this can be found amongst our documentation:

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

At the moment due to a configuration issue with Succeed it is not possible to upload a new language pack that would switch the word term for semester. Once this issue is resolved the new language pack will be installed. The document above assumes that the language pack is installed.

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.

Teaching Bites II

Assessment, Copyright, Listen Again, Plagiarism, Succeed, Teaching Bites, Turnitin

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?

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

Turnitin Now Accepts More File Types

Succeed, Turnitin,

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