eLD and the School of Education are running some ‘Teaching Bite’ sessions.

To sign-up for any of the talks below (eLD) simply go to Succeed -> Learning and Development – My Learning -> Teaching Bites and then select the talks you wish to attend.

Wednesday 16th September, 1-2pm, S10: 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

Thursday 17th September, 1-2pm, S10: Mobile
The wireless service at the University opens up some exciting possibilities for student engagement in teaching and learning – laptops, tablets and smart phones can now quickly and easily connect to Eduroam and get Internet access. Students amongst other things can then participate in polls (rather similar to clicker technology) or tweet questions/comments.

Thursday 24th September, 1-2pm, S10: Turnitin – GradeMark
Turnitin offers much more than plagiarism detection. It has tools to facilitate peer marking and online marking (‘GradeMark’). This talk will demonstrate how to use GradeMark and discuss the positive and negative features of marking online.

Thursday 1st October,  1-2pm, S10: 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.

The School of Education are also running a series of seminars that are open to all staff. To sign-up for these sessions please email ‘Education Admin’.

Wednesday 23rd September, 1-2pm, C25:  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.

Wednesday 30th September, 1-2pm, A5: Collaborate
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.

Wednesday 14th October, 1-2pm, C25: Digitial Tools in Assessment
This session will look at how digital tools can be used enable different forms of assessment. It will look at assessments using student journals, wikis and digital video and consider the benefits and potential problems of these.

Wednesday 28th October, 1-2pm, C25: VoiceThread
VoiceThread bridges the gap between real-time discussions and online presemtations. The simplest way to view this tool is like a spoken discussion board not a written, text-based board and best way to find out more is a attend this session.

To attend one of the School of Education

The latest Turnitin Webcast, entitled, “Stopping Plagiarism at the Source: Why Assignments Matter” is being held this Thursday (6th November) at 18.00 (GMT). Author Barry Gilmore will reconsider assignments with the goal of discovering how plagiarism can be stopped before it happens. To join in with this Webcast visit the following web site:

http://go.turnitin.com/e/45292/stopping-plagiarism-at-source/24yfz/137309965

As if finding out about plagiarism wasn’t enough on its own, Certificates of Participation will also be provided to attendees of the Webcast.

We have access to two tools that allow student assignment submissions to be distributed among the student group for formative, anonymous peer assessment – the bulit-in tool in Succeed and Turnitin’s PeerMark tool.

We have, however, recently become aware of a bug in the Self and Peer Assessment tool within Succeed that we think makes it unusable and are recommending that only PeerMark is used at the moment.

Logically, these tools should only allocate evaluations to students who have submitted the assignment and only ask for evaluations of the work of students who have submitted. The Succeed tool is assigning students for peer evaluation regardless of whether they have submitted  – this means that some students are being given nothing to review while others are not having their evaluations done. PeerMark only allocates evaluations to those who have submitted and so works as expected.

If you need any assitance in setting up a PeerMark assignment please get in touch with your eLD contact.

As of 1st August 2014, the place in which Listen Again recordings are saved has changed and moved onto a folder associated with the next academic year. What does this mean in practice for you when you record a lecture? Well, both the manner in which you log into Camtasia Relay and the recording process will be exactly the same, but the output, your recording, will go into a different folder, one called ‘2014’ instead of ‘2013’. This is important as this folder name features in the URL of the destination Listen Again page.

For example, if you made a recording in July for the module ‘NURP25’ using the nurp25 account for Camtasia Relay, then your recording would have ended up on a page with ‘2013’ as its folder name, so the address would be:

http://listenagain.stir.ac.uk/media/2013/nurp25/listenagain.php

After now, however, recordings will go into a ‘2014’ folder, so the address of the output page will be:

http://listenagain.stir.ac.uk/media/2014/nurp25/listenagain.php

This means if you have been making some recordings for, say, an Autumn 2014 module in advance of this change and you wish to continue making some more recordings for the same module after the change, then at the moment as things stand half of them will be on one Listen Again page and half on another. The eLD team has a way of moving recordings easily from one page to another, so if you find yourself in this position please contact your eLD representative and we will help you organise your Listen Again page appropriately. This page lists the eLD team and the Schools they support:

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

This service from eLD is also available if you made recordings last year and wish to re-use those again this year. Please let your eLD representative know which recordings you wish to copy through from last year to this year and obviously which is the module in question.

Finally, before semester starts please make sure you have the relevant URL in your Succeed module to link to the recordings you wish students to see.

There are a couple of items to note regarding next semester’s modules in Succeed.

1. The Library Resources / SLS links under the Learning Resources menu will be (or should be for rollovers) deleted as they are being moved to exploit some of the new functionality in Succeed that allows them to be easily updated.  Further information at:

https://e-learning.wordpress.stir.ac.uk/2014/06/23/community-and-content/

2. One thing for instructors to be aware of is the proposal below which comes about from student comments regarding redundant information and difficulty navigating in Succeed modules.  (The full document, of which this is the preamble, will be available in due course).

 Copying Succeed Course Content
Introduction

In order to keep modules tidy it has been proposed that a new version be created each time a course is taught.  Previously modules would have been “rolled over” with their entire content but as files are updated this leads to a cluttered file manager and perhaps outdated links.  It will still be possible to request rollover but the default will be a module based on a standard template for your division.

It is possible to reuse previous content by:
a)       copying some or all of the existing links into an existing (or newly created) module but with some caveats
b)       copying individual files across (either singly or multiples) and then creating a
link to those
c)       Recommended is using the NEW FEATURE:   the Content Collection   (this replaces the file manager)
The Content Collection provides central file storage for all content. When creating content for your course, you can link to items anywhere in the Content Collection. When you change an item in the Content Collection, all links to the item reflect those changes. Using the links in the Control Panel, you can access the content in your present course, in all courses you teach, in all of your organisations (eventually), or in all of the courses in the institution.  Thus, only one file needs to be maintained.

In order to organize material initially, instructors will need to maintain access to previous modules, however, it is possible to remove oneself after materials are recycled by going into the old module and then:
          1.  Course Management
          2.  Users and Groups
          3.  Users
          4.  Select your entry and then
          5.  Remove Users from Course

An error message results because you are no longer a member of that course but the module will disappear from the My Courses list in My Succeed.  (If you find that something has been forgotten your ELD rep can always restore access.)

If there are any queries please contact ELD.

A new training document is now available with 5 tips to help make your succeed module easier for students to navigate, covering:

• File format
• Adding Items
  • Consistency
  • Description area
  • Add the file extension
• Use of tables
• Minimise clicks
• File size

http://www.stir.ac.uk/media/schools/is/documents/succeeddocuments/5Points.pdf