Lecturecast Live is a new feature within Lecturecast, UCL’s video capturing service, and installed across 180 teaching spaces. It now facilitates live streaming of in-classroom sessions, which remote students can access via their Moodle courses in the same manner as Lecturecast recorded teaching events. This is one of the basic hybrid teaching options introduced for the 21/22 academic year.

The live streaming function should be selected when scheduling modular events for which remote students need synchronous video transmission of a teaching event. UCL is a campus-based institution with the primary mode of teaching and learning designed to be face to face, and thus live streaming is not enabled by default.

Scheduling Lecturecast Live 

Course administrators will first access Lecturecast Scheduler and complete the initial steps to search for a CMIS booked and confirmed event. Once the teaching event is located and its tickbox is selected, users can either select ‘Create Event’ if it has not yet been scheduled for capture or ‘Edit Event’ to modify an already scheduled capture event. Lecturecast Live is an option listed within ‘Additional Capture Info’ (see image).

The box next to ‘Enable live stream’ must be ticked and the schedule saved. Please see step 3.3 in the Create & Edit an Individual Schedule Lecturecast Scheduler guidance.  

Bulk scheduling with live streaming has also been enabled. Please note that it can only be used when creating new schedules.

Moodle course administrators and tutors will not need to take any additional steps in Moodle to link and enable live streams than they have for other Lecturecast events. 

Accessing Lecturecast Live 

Students will not need to take any additional steps in Moodle to access live streams than they have for other Lecturecast recordings. 

Both students and staff will see which sessions have been scheduled for live streaming, or are currently live streaming, by the addition of a ‘LIVE’ icon to the right of the event name within Echo360 (see image). Upcoming live streams are in grey while current live streams are in green. 

The video interface will open once the event is selected. If the live stream is upcoming then students and staff will see a countdown until the live event begins. If the event is currently live streaming then students and staff will need to click on the bottom left option ‘Show Live Stream’* (see image). We recommend reminding students of this step should they encounter difficulties starting the live stream. 

*We are providing feedback to Echo360 on student and staff experience in accessing the live streaming function. Please contact lecturecast@ucl.ac.uk with any comments and suggestions. 

Benefits 

• Fully integrated with Moodle so students will access live streaming teaching events in the same way that they currently access Lecturecast recordings. 

• Live streaming is automatic once scheduled. 

• Students have the same view as Lecturecast recordings, which include the in-room video feed of the lectern and a feed of the presentation materials shared using the in-room audio-visual system. Audio continues to be captured using in-room mics. 

• If students have connectivity issues, they can reconnect to the live stream or view the recording via Moodle once the teaching event is completed and the video has been processed and made available. 

• Teaching staff can access viewing analytics as they would with any Lecturecast recording. 

• Can be combined with Moodle activity completion tracking. 

• Available via web browser so no additional software required. 

Considerations 

• Of the basic hybrid options for 2021/22, Lecturecast Live is the least interactive for remote students taking part in synchronous teaching and learning because it is a one-way video stream. 
• There may be a ten second delay or more for those viewing the live stream.

Future roadmap 

• The Lecturecast Scheduler tool will continue to be enhanced to further facilitate the scheduling of live streaming. 

Documentation 

Detailed guidance on using Lecturecast, including the scheduling of live streaming, can be found in the Lecturecast Resource Centre wiki.  

Resources for basic hybrid teaching options can be found via the following: 

Basic Hybrid Teaching in UCL’s Spaces for Term 1 of 2021-22  

Support for staff teaching on-campus and online students together  

UCL Education Planning FAQs and Town Halls 2021-22 

Case Studies 

Echo360 Webcasting & Livestreaming articles https://echo360.com/category/webcasting-live-streaming/  

Digital Education are keen to understand which live teaching tool you use and perhaps more importantly how you use it. Please contact lecturecast@ucl.ac.uk if you would be willing to share your experiences in a case study. 

To support faculty in designing and teaching their online courses in the next terms, learning designers Alexandra Mihai and Heather Serdar from the Online Education team are offering in the next months a series of four new workshops aimed at providing practical guidance for designing and managing learning activities using both synchronous and asynchronous modalities.

The workshops have been designed as stand-alone 90-minute sessions but attending all four of them provides a 360 degrees perspective on the online teaching experience- from design to delivery, including a curated selection of resources and customisable templates.

Synchronous online teaching

Orchestrating synchronous interactions in the virtual classroom needs to be more intentionally planned than in a face-to-face environment. Setting clear goals and understanding where live sessions can bring the most added value to the learning experience is an important starting point. A well-managed live online teaching session can create opportunities for engagement and conversation.

The session on “Designing synchronous learning activities” provides practical guidance on how to design synchronous online learning sessions, including creating a variety of learning activities to engage students throughout the session, deciding what interaction channels to use and setting up effective mechanism for moderation and time management.

To complement it, the session on “Teaching synchronous classes” focuses on creating a community of practice, setting learner expectations of synchronous learning and teaching and managing groups in synchronous sessions.

Asynchronous online teaching

The online space can provide a flexible learning environment, without space and time constraints. Learning takes place also beyond the virtual classroom. In order to make sure students are motivated and engaged, asynchronous learning activities have to be carefully designed and managed.

The session on “Designing asynchronous learning activities” offers practical guidance on designing and sequencing asynchronous learning activities. Participants will have the opportunity to zoom into the actual activity design process and discuss how to create different individual and group learning activities, how to communicate them clearly to students and how to embed them into the overall course.

Moving on to the more practical aspects, the fourth session of the series, “Teaching with asynchronous learning activities” provides the opportunity to discuss communities of learning, learn about different activities that are appropriate for various subject areas and identify functions in Moodle that support asynchronous learning.

Here is the schedule of the new workshops. You can register here.

In addition to the new workshops, Heather and Alexandra will still run two 60-minutes sessions of the Designing Connected Learning Lectures this year, on Wednesday, 18 November, 12:00 and Wednesday, 16 December, 12:00.

We look forward to welcoming you to the workshops and supporting you in designing and teaching your courses.

The reduction of on-campus teaching and students studying remotely provides a greater emphasis on understanding how they are engaging with the learning activities within their course.

Moodle does provide some tools for this, and anecdotally they are less well known than they might be. The tools range from a quick check on whether students are accessing a particular course, to a much more detailed view of who has completed which activities within a course. They provide a window into how students are doing but of course are only crude proxies for engagement and learning, and should also be supplemented by other information to understand and support our students as best we can.

Here’s a quick guide to three options based on questions you might want to ask.

When did students last access this course?

You can get a quick report of the last time each of your students accessed your Moodle course. This is particularly useful at the start of term for highlighting students who have never accessed your course and might be having access difficulties and need further support.

To view this report, go to Course Administration -> Users -> Enrolled Users. The Last Access to Course header of this table is clickable so you can sort by this field (clicking once will show those students who have never accessed this course, or have not accessed this course for the longest times, at the top of the table.

Who has or has not viewed or participated in a given activity?

To understand engagement on a specific activity, use Course Participation reports. Find these at Course Administration -> Reports -> Course Participation. You will need to select an activity. In this case, we’re choosing an early activity where students say hello to each other. This is a forum called ‘Getting to know each other’. I select this from the Activity list, and select Students from the ‘Show only’ list, then click Go to get the following report:

This shows your students and indicates whether they have engaged with this activity with a Yes or No. The number in brackets shows the number of engagements, and gives a rough and ready guide, but I wouldn’t take it too literally as different people will normally use websites in different ways. Again the table headers are clickable, so clicking on All actions will order based on that column.

You can drill down a little further by choosing one of the options from the Show actions menu. In this case the options are View and Post. These terms are however slightly misleading, as they count other actions too, but give a broad measure of level of active contribution as compared to reading the work of others.

Finally you can quickly send a message to all students in a No in the actions column, but clicking on Select all ‘No’ and choosing Send a message from the dropdown.

How can I see if students have completed the activities across my course?

Activity completion is a tool in Moodle that lets you get an overview of student participation in all activities in your course. This does need to be set up in advance and is very flexible and configurable.

Once activity completion is turned on for your course, each activity in your course is marked either complete or incomplete for each student. Each activity with then be marked as complete based on student activity in a number of different ways:

• The student themselves mark is as complete, using a checkbox next to the activity;
• A simple ‘view’ of the activity marks it as complete;
• A more complex set of criteria is established to mark the activity is complete. This depends on the type of activity but might be getting a certain mark on a quiz, or submitting a document to an assignment, or posting a message in a forum. These criteria are defined by the teacher on an activity-by-activity basis.

An illustrative screenshot of the report available is shown below. Here you can see that one student has gone ahead of the others, two are up to date, one is a little behind, and one has not completed any activities at all.

The video below explains more about activity completion:

There is a Miniguide on activity completion and also a case study from Jane Burns of using it in UCL teaching.

Reporting across Moodle courses

A limitation is that these tools apply at the level of a Moodle course, which is normally a module, and this limits the ability to get an holistic view of the activities of any particular student. We are very aware of this limitation and are rapidly looking at options for providing a more holistic and student-centred reporting ability.

Links to the UCL Resource Centres for tools mentioned at the Town Hall today.

Live Teaching

Blackboard Collaborate is UCL’s web conferencing or online classroom platform. It is integrated within Moodle as an activity, providing access to a range of different functions in a live, or synchronous, learning environment. UCL Case Study: Using Blackboard Collaborate to teach students across the world.

Zoom is coming to UCL and support information will be available then.

Teams​, now universally used at UCL for meetings and one-to-one sessions, is not yet recommended for group teaching. There is no Moodle or Portico integration and Digital Education do not have the expertise (yet) support in its use for teaching.​

Virtual Cluster Rooms will provide direct access to cluster room PCs for computer-based classes. They Mirror the physical cluster rooms in virtual groups that will be timetabled in the same way and accessed via UCL Desktop Anywhere. More information and guidance about planning for laboratory and practice-based activities is also being developed.

Live/Asynchonous

Mentimeter (polling) is an online polling, questioning and voting tool that you can use in your classes or presentations, whether they are face-to-face or online, synchronous or asynchronous. UCL has a site-wide licence. UCL Case Study: Engaging students asynchronously with Mentimeter.

Visualisers and graphics tablets can assist online teaching. ISD have a limited stock of visualisers for circulation to lecturers. You can read more about options for writing and showing objectson this digital education blog post.

Asynchronous

Moodle has many tools that can help keep your students engaged and learning in the absence of face-to-face sessions. UCL Case Study: Moodle tools to make your teaching more interactive.

• Discussion Forums are often considered the mainstay of online learning. Many staff already use the News forum to announce important information. ‘Learning forums’ can be used for asynchronous discussion (i.e. not ‘real time’) and learning activities. They enable both staff and students to post and reply to posts and are usually are set to allow students and staff to choose whether to become or remain subscribed to a forum. We recommend that Q&A forums are set up for students to ask questions about the course work or assessment processes. Make the purpose of every discussion forum clear, including how students are expected to engage with it and how often staff will reply to posts (if at all). If you want to speak to students in ‘real time’, for example for virtual Office Hours, you might want to try Moodle’s instant messaging style tool, Chat.
• Quiz is the other popular tool for online engagement. A quiz is a useful way to test or evaluate students’ knowledge and to keep them motivated by letting them see areas for improvement. Marking can be automated on some question types (such as multiple choice). Staff can see a detailed breakdown of results, as well as statistics on how easy or discriminating each question is. It can be used for both formative and summative (credit bearing) assessment, such as in class tests or examinations, but the latter is usually done in a ‘live’ classroom, so for online learning summative quizzes are more normal.
• Hot Question used to create a list of popular questions or topics from a group. Participants may ‘rate’ others’ questions. The more votes, the hotter the question and the higher up the list it will appear.
• Book displays collections of web pages in a sequential, easy-to-navigate and printable format. They are especially useful when you have a lot of web content but don’t want it to clutter the front page of your course. Pages can contain links, images, embedded YouTube videos, etc and feature a Table of Contents.
• Lessons can be used to build structured pathways through learning materials and test knowledge as students make progress. Students usually make choices on each page area, sending send them to another specific page in the manner of a decision tree.
• H5P is a simple-to-use tool now integrated into Moodle to create interactive content such as drag and drop, fill in the blanks, flashcards, image hotspots, slideshows, games and formative quizzes (the results are not stored) directly within Moodle. UCL Case Study: Creating interactive video training guides in Moodle.

Lecturecast Universal Capture Personal (screen recording) is a stand-alone application which can be used to create recordings (captures). Recordings can include slides (or whatever you choose to show on your computer screen), video of the presenter and audio. Recordings can include slides (or whatever you choose to show on your computer screen), video of the presenter and audio. Lecturecast offers more than just video playback, though. With the Lecturecast Engagement tools,  tutors can set up interactive activities, to engage and support students.

ReadingLists@UCL is an online service that gives students easy access to materials on their reading lists, allowing academic staff to create and update their own reading lists.

LinkedIn Learning provides a vast range of video tutorials supporting learning in software, creative and business skills – all free to UCL staff and currently enrolled students.

Box of Broadcasts (BoB) is Learning on Screen’s on demand TV and radio service for education. The academically focused system allows staff and students to record programmes from over 75 free-to-air channels, and search BoB’s extensive archive of over 2.2 million recordings.

Student-led and collaboration

• Reflect(WordPress blog) is a form of WordPress, the industry-standard blogging and website-building tool. Blogs may be used to help students reflect on their experiences during study, build a portfolio of their work, collaborate on projects and create public-facing materials. UCL Case Study: Medical Science students use UCL Reflect to create scientific blogs for assessment.
• MyPortfolio is a very flexible tool which can be used as a portfolio, for blogging, CV builder, social networking system, connecting UCL students and staff and creating online communities. MyPortfolio provides you with the tools to set up a personal learning environment and can also be used to support group work.
• Office365​, is of course ubiquitous at UCL, but the educational possibilities are not always appreciated. LinkedIn Learning includes a useful overview ‘Office 365 for Educators’.

Open Education practices and resources have become increasingly important of late. Sharing what we have learnt and changes that we have made in our approach to digital pedagogy and learning design are important in helping create the best possible learning opportunities for our students. In addition, as students may not have access to all the resources available via campus, now is a good time to re-use, share and create open educational resources. For instance, selecting an open textbook will enable greater access to a textbook resource.

Ongoing support

UCL Digital Education are continuing to run a series of online drop-in and training sessions. A full list of all upcoming sessions is available on the DigiEd team blog. In addition, a series of how-to videos are available via the E-learning wiki.

Arena centre colleagues are also hosting a range of online drop-ins. Details are given on the Teaching Continuity webpages.

SIG update

All OpenEd@UCL SIG face to face meetings are suspended for the forseeable future, including both SIG meetings and the monthly informal meet-ups.  Instead we will be keeping in contact via our SIG space on Teams and the mailing list. We are have already held one successful remote meeting and we will advertise upcoming meeting dates and times via our Teams space.

Resources

• OpenEd@UCL – Find Open Education Resources (OER) and guidance from UCL
• Open.Ed – OER from the University of Edinburgh
• Open Textbook Library  – content organised by subject area
• Directory of open access books
• Carpentries.org lessons – Computing and Data Science lessons using open source tools
• Google Arts and Culture – a range of articles, videos and and virtual tours
• PHET Interactive Simulations – a range of STEM simulations
• Political Ecology Network – the sharing of political ecology syllabi
• UK Copyright Literacy
• The OER Starter Kit Workbook – Abbey Elder and Stacey Katz, this project offers worksheets for teachers to reflect as they begin to explore and create their Open Educational Resources.
• SEDA Pandemic Resources – an editable Google doc with a list of resources by topic
• Reflective Tool for Emergency response to teaching online (MSWord)– Centre for Distance Education, University of London. It will prompt you to consider what worked well and what was less successful, and the implications of the emergency teaching process for the next academic year and beyond.
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Things to read or watch

• Blog post:  Assessment alternatives at a time of university closures – Prof Sally Brown
• Free course: Take your teaching online
• Blog: The EdTechie – Martin Weller, IET OU
• Webinars: Tutoring Matters  – UK Advising and Tutoring (UKAT)
• Journal article: Becoming an open educator: towards an open threshold framework
• Journal article: Accessibility within open educational resources and practices for disabled learners: a systematic literature review
• Conference: Catch-up on #OER20 sessions, links to recording are available in the conference programme.
• Journal articles: 2019 Open Education Global Conference selected papers
• Blog post: Is it time to get wiki’d?– UCL Digital Education

This blog post has been re-made for exams in 2021 – visit the Marking centrally managed exams in 2021 blog post.

Please note this post is being regularly updated with additional resources.
+ New on Friday 8 May: Guide to online marking from Mary Richardson
+ New on Friday 8 May: Microsoft Drawboard PDF demo from Dewi Lewis, UCL Chemistry
+ New on Friday 15 May: Updated details on Microsoft Drawboard PDF

The move to online 24 hour assessments that replace traditional exams leads to a challenge for those that have to grade and mark the work.

We start from a place of two knowns:

• Students are submitting work to Turnitin in Moodle during the 24 hour window; and
• Final grades need to be stored in Portico, our student records system.

But in between those two endpoints, there are many different workflows by which marking can take place. These are set out by the UCL’s Academic Manual but encompasses a range of choices, particularly in how second marking is completed. One key difference between regular courseworks is that this is not about providing feedback to students, but instead about supporting the marking process, the communication between markers and the required record of the marking process. At the end of the marking process departments will need to ensure that scripts are stored securely but can be accessed by relevant staff as required, much in line with requirements for paper versions over previous years.

Neither SRS nor Digital Education mandate any particular way that marking should take place and there is considerable flexibility for departments to use processes that work best for them. So we are suggesting a menu of options which provide a basis for departments to build on if they so choose. We are also running daily training sessions which as listed at the foot of this document.

The menu options are:

• Markers review the scripts and mark or annotate them using Turnitin Feedback Studio
• Digital Education will provide PDF copies of scripts for departments to annotate using PDF annotation software on a computer or tablet device.
• Markers review the scripts using Turnitin Feedback Studio, but keep a ‘marker file’ or notes and comments on the marking process.
• Markers print the scripts and mark them, then scan them for storage or keep them for return to the department on paper.

The rest of this post goes into these options in more detail.

Turnitin Feedback Studio

Turnitin Feedback Studio provides a web-based interface where comments can be overlaid on a student’s work. QuickMarks provide a bank of comments that occur regularly that can be just drag and dropped onto the work. In addition, the traditional Turnitin Similarity Report is also available. This method probably works best for text-based documents like essays and reports. Turnitin is integrated into Moodle and set up for you as part of the exam process for students to submit their work, but it’s your choice if you wish to use the marking tools available after the work has been submitted. The Turnitin submission boxes have been set up for you, and we ask that you don’t change the settings or set up any grading templates to mark student work before submission, as this could prevent students from submitting.

You can also allocate marks using grading forms or rubrics.  On the whole we think that these could be a bit of a ‘sledgehammer to crack a nut’ solution for a single paper, but it is an option available to you if you are familiar with them and you have a more granular set marking criteria for each question. We recommend hiding the assignment before adding the grading form or rubric so that students cannot see it.

If you want to know if this method is for you, you can watch a short video demo or  try marking up an example paper provided by Turnitin. A video tailored to UCL’s 24 hour exam process is given below. This video has captions.

Things to think about with this approach:

• Rubrics and grading forms take a little bit of setting up, and are probably best used where you have previous experience in doing them.
• In some exams it is common to put a mark (e.g. a tick) on each page to indicate that the page has been read. To replicate this you might define a QuickMark called ‘page read’ and put it on each page, or annotate with the same words
• The marked paper often becomes a resource to go back to if there are any errors or omissions in the grading process. You might wish to both write the marks on the paper using the annotation tools or in the general feedback area, and also lodge them in a spreadsheet for uploading to Portico.
• Turnitin does not support double blind marking effectively. It is rarely used for paper-based exams (since the second marker could always see the markings of the first marker on the paper) but if it was needed one marker could mark online and the second could download the papers for offline marking (e.g the ‘marker form’ method below).

You can view additional guidance on using Turnitin Feedback Studio.

Annotation using PDF documents

Where you annotation needs are more sophisticated, or you want to ‘write’ on the paper using a graphics tablet or a tablet and pencil/stylus, then this option may suit you better.

Upon notification (notification form) Digital Education will supply your department with PDF copies of the students’ work, uploaded to a OneDrive account set up by your department.

For this to happen, Exam Liaison Officers / Teaching Administrators will need to set up a OneDrive folder and notify Digital Education that they wish to have PDF copies of the files. We have a video tutorial (with captions) on this process below.

You can then use tools you already have or prefer to use to do your marking. There is more flexibility here, and we will not be able to advise and support every PDF tool available or give precise instructions for every workflow used by departments, but we give some examples here.

Marking on an iPad using OneDrive

Many staff have reported using an iPad with Apple Pencil or an Android tablet with a stylus to be a very effective marking tool. The Microsoft OneDrive app supports both platforms and provides rapid access to scripts and some annotation tools as shown in the video below (which also has captions). The OneDrive app is free, and connects to your UCL OneDrive account via Single Sign On.

There’s further guidance from Microsoft on each individual annotation tool.

The Apple Files app can also connect to OneDrive and has a similar (and perhaps more powerful) annotation tool. Thanks to David Bowler for mentioning this in the first comment on this blog post.

Marking on a Mac using Preview

Preview on a Mac is often taken for granted but is actually quite a sophisticated tool and includes some basic annotation functions. Here is some guidance from Apple on using it.

Marking on a PC or Surface Pro using Microsoft Drawboard PDF

Microsoft Drawboard PDF is a very comprehensive annotation tool, but is only available for Windows 10 and is really designed to be used with a Surface Pro or a desktop with a graphics tablet. Dewi Lewis from UCL Chemistry has produced a video illustrating the annotation tools available and how to mark a set of files easily. UCL does not have a site-wide licence for Drawboard PDF, but it is available at a very modest price if departments choose to buy it.

Marking on a PC, Mac or Linux machine using a PDF annotation program.

Of course there are plenty of third party tools that support annotating PDF documents. Some requirement payment to access the annotation facilities (or to save files that have been annotated) but two that do not are Xodo and Foxit PDF.

Things to think about with this approach:

• Your marking process: if you use double blind marking you might need to make two copies of the files, one for each marker. If you use check marking then a single copy will suffice.
• You will need to ensure the files are stored securely and can be accessed by the relevant departmental staff in case of any query. You might share the exam submission files with key contacts such as teaching administrators or directors of teaching.
• Some of the products listed above have a small charge, as would any stylus or pencil that staff would need. These cannot be supplied centrally, so you may need a process for staff claiming back the costs from departments.

Using a ‘marker file’

Accessing the students’ scripts is done using Turnitin in Moodle, which allows all the papers to be viewed online individually or downloaded in one go. Then a separate document is kept (either one per script, or one overall) containing the marks and marker feedback for each comment. If double-blind marking is being used, then it is easy to see that two such documents or sets of documents could be kept in this way.

Printing scripts and marking on paper

Although we have moved to online submission this year, colleagues are still welcome to print documents and mark on paper. However there is no central printing service available for completed scripts to be printed, and this would have to be managed individually or locally by departments.

The evidence about marking online

In this video Dr Mary Richardson, Associate Professor in Educational Assessment at the IOE, gives a guide to how online marking can differ from paper-based marking and offers some tips for those new to online marking. The video has captions.

Training sessions and support

Digital Education will be running daily training sessions for teachers covering the ground in this blog post. These will run at 12-1pm every weekday from Tuesday 12 May.

• Marking 24 hour exams: options and guidance – daily from Tuesday 12 May 2020, 12pm – 1pm
• To join a session, navigate to the Teaching and Assessment Continuity – Staff Development Sessions Moodle course, self-enrol, and select the appropriate session.

No booking necessary.

We are also providing additional support for students during the exam period. Our support hours will be (UK time):

• Monday 11.30am-8.30pm
• Tuesday-Thursday 8am-8pm
• Friday: 7.30am-3.30pm

Details of support mechanisms are given in the exam section on each Moodle module where an exam is taking place.