Author: John MacMillan

Turnitin – insightful perspectives on education

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Each webcast is a half-hour and offers a fresh take on hot topics from experts in and around education.

January 16
The Future of Wikipedia in Education
Jake Orlowitz, Editor at Wikipedia

This webcast will explore how Wikipedia can be responsibly integrated into university courses for thinking about research, digital literacy, and critical thinking about the reliability of information.

January 30
How Instructors Respond to Plagiarism: Survey Findings
Jason Chu, Education Director at Turnitin

How do instructors respond when they encounter plagiarism and how do these responses change if plagiarism continues?

February 5
Responding to Student Plagiarism as an Educational Opportunity
Gerald Nelms, Academic Director for Developmental Writing at Wright State University

Investigating cases of student plagiarism must involve more than simply textual evidence of shared discourse and use or misuse of citation conventions.

February 13
Literacy is Fundamental: Leveraging Critical Reading to Improve Student Writing
Lynn Lampert, California State University Northridge

How has the immediacy, ready access to, and wealth of information online impacted student literacy?

February 27
Ghostbusting: Getting the Ghostwriter Out of Your Class
Dave Tomar, Author of “The Shadow Scholar: How I Made a Living Helping College Kids Cheat.”

How can instructors effectively identify bought papers and guide students away from using these services?

Setting the Start and End Dates of a Succeed Module

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The following information will be useful to you regarding the Start Date of your Spring semester module in Succeed. Modules created in Succeed have default dates in them for when they open (become available to students to see) and close (stop being available to students to see). These Start and End Dates usually coincide with the start and end of semester, but if your module is running at all outwith these dates you may edit the dates accordingly. Anyone with instructor level access to the module may do this. Here’s a guide on what to do:

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

eLearning Forum

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The next meeting of the eLearning Forum will be on 23rd January in the Enterprise Zone from 12.30 – 14.00. Lunch will be provided. The topic for the forum is electronic marking and will discuss the three ways this can be done at Stirling:

(i) A method that allows the downloading of the submissions in Succeed, marking usning Word (comment/track-changes) and finally a mechanism to return the marked work to the students.

(ii) Turnitin’s GradeMark tool (available when using Turnitin)

(iii) Succeed’s Crocodoc tool (part of the Succeed Assignment Tool)

Note that method (i) allows for offline marking whereas (ii) and (iii) require an internet connection.

As lunch is being provided we need to know who is planning on coming along. Please let Kirsteen Young (via email) if you wish to attend: kirsteen.young@stir.ac.uk

Encouraging your students to fill in the MEQ

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As the end of the Autumn semester approaches, chances are you’ll be wanting to make sure that your students complete their end-of-module feedback questionnaire, the Module Evaluation Questionnaire (MEQ). You have several tools at your disposal to try and ensure you get the maximum number of returns:

  • Remind the students to complete the MEQ via a course Announcement – see Creating an Announcement.
  • Remind just those students who haven’t completed it by email – find out who they are by going to the Grade Centre, locating the column associated with the MEQ and then looking for the double dash. This indicates no submission for that student. The green tick shows they have completed the MEQ, the blue clock shows they are in progress now (as shown below).

    meq

  • Base the release of certain items in the module on the condition that the students have completed the MEQ (using Adaptive Release). This could include example past papers in the run up to the exam, or you could make the link to your Listen Again page dependent upon students having completed the MEQ. This video guide from Blackboard On Demand will show you how to set up Adaptive Release criteria:
    http://ondemand.blackboard.com/r9/movies/Bb9_Adaptive_Release_Create_Simple_Rule.htm

Finally, the guide on how you as a tutor access the MEQ data, download it from Succeed and run it through the specially developed Excel Add-In to produce a report in Word is available on the Succeed Help Pages:
http://www.stir.ac.uk/media/schools/is/documents/succeeddocuments/18_meq.pdf

Guide to Setting up Turnitin Assignments in Succeed

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With the Spring Semester now not too far away and new module spaces for Succeed modules will be being created in the next few weeks, thoughts turn towards assignment submission. If your students need to use Turnitin to submit their assignments or to check their assignments prior to making a submission then you’ll need to set up a Turnitin Assignment area in Succeed. This guide will help you do this:

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

Camtasia Studio 7 Video Help Guides

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For those of you who use Camtasia Studio to make and edit recordings (which you may then add to a Listen Again page), you may be interested to know that there is a range of video help tutorials on the TechSmith web site. These explain how to perform a whole series of tasks in Camtasia Studio; including editing the unwanted video and audio from your clip, adding Title Clips at various points in the recording and zooming and panning between areas of the recording. All these features will help enhance your presentations when users view your recordings later. The help videos for Camtasia Studio version 7 (the version available on campus) are here:
http://www.techsmith.com/tutorial-camtasia-7.html

For those of you who are interested the next version, Camtasia Studio 8, is available for a free trial download from the TechSmith web site. It includes a few new, enhanced features which you may make use of in the the trial period. Version 7 is the licensed version on campus, however, so when your free trial with version 8 runs out you’ll be back to using version 7 for now.

MEQ Panel

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Staff will have spotted the new ‘Module Evaluation Questionnaire’ (MEQ) panel in Succeed:

MEQ Panel for Staff

The main purpose of adding this to Succeed is to try and increase the response from the students for MEQs. For students, the panel lists for each individual their open, unanswered MEQs:

MEQ Panel for Students

One link for each unanswered MEQ. Clicking on the link takes the student directly to the MEQ for the module from where it is easily submitted.

This panel also illustrates a feature that we will get with the community system we have purchased to enhance Succeed (when the system is upgraded with the new features). The feature is the ability to show a panel to only those individuals that need to see it. With the community system this panel would not appear for staff at all. Presently it has to be specially programmed to do nothing, bar display a message, when present for staff — far more sensible not to display at all. The community system should be available next semester.

Add Video to your Discussions

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Succeed’s Discussions Tool supports the addition of video messages. All you need is a YouTube (Google) account and some means of recording yourself (such as a webcam) and you can add video messages to the Discussions Tool. Click the Record from Webcam button in the formatting toolbar whilst creating you message:

record_from_webcam

This opens up a recording window. Log into your YouTube (Google) account. You may be asked to grant permission for Succeed to use your YouTube (Google) account. Agree to this and then you will be to make the recording of your message through your webcam. Click Upload and the file is uploaded to your YouTube (Google) account and then either embedded or a thumbnail link to it is placed in your Discussions Posting, whichever you choose.

Although this is a great way to add a human element to the Discussions Tool in Succeed, it is worth bearing in mind that all the videos you record are potentially viewable through YouTube and so it is not a suitable medium for discussing all topics, and neither is it a suitable medium to provide students with feedback on their work. It can, however, brighten up your online discussions. It may also be a way to bring short recordings from specialists or experts in the field into the discussions forum.