Some users may have experienced problems with Turnitin between 15:00 and 16:25 PM on the 12 June 2014. These issues have now successfully been resolved. We apologise for the inconvenience caused by these issues, and thank you for your patience as we worked with Turnitin to correct them.

All times are for the UK (GMT or BST), for other locations please convert: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html

Last week saw the final session in the current series of Summits and Horizons, a seminar series jointly organised by the Centre for the Advancement in Learning and Teaching (CALT) and E-Learning Environments (ELE). Appropriately, the session focused on the predictions of the 2014 NMC Horizons Report, in the context of use of emerging technologies to support teaching and learning at UCL.

Fiona Strawbridge highlighted the trends, challenges and emerging technologies identified in the report:

Fiona’s slides, and a video précis of the report are also available.

Ros Duhs highlighted the need to consider the relevance of what students are learning at university for the future workplace, and stressed the importance of authentic learning, teaching and assessment strategies.

Janina Dewitz considered recently emerging technologies including semantic aware applications and smart objects (predicted in the 2009 NMC Horizons report) and affective computing. Her take on these technologies was that although many are being taken up by the consumer market, they have yet to make a substantial impact on higher education. Janina also mentioned individuals’ right to privacy and the lack of trust surrounding commercial access to their personal data. Similarly, students may object to the transparency associated with learning analytics; there is also the difficulty of measuring learning online since learning happens all the time and in other places.

Clive Young presented the results of a survey ELE conducted with teaching staff about their use of external cloud-based tools. The survey revealed that a large range of external tools, which are used personally, are also being used to support teaching, research and administration, but more support may be necessary to increase adoption beyond the early adopters. The results are being reported in more detail in another blog post.

Nick Grindle looked back at the technologies predicted in earlier NMC Reports. While some technologies such as mobile computing and apps, cloud computing and geo-everything have materialised within the predicted timeframe, one area which has still to reach its potential is gaming and gamification, first mentioned in the 2005 report. This is one of the themes of the forthcoming call for submissions for the E-Learning Development Grants, so hopefully at UCL we can make progress in this area.

A closing panel discussion highlighted the role of the Arena Scheme, in partnership with ELE, in promoting digital scholarship. There was also a discussion about the importance of the institutional learning environment for security and support in using e-learning. While Moodle works extremely well and is very highly rated by students, we should be alert for the emergence of other platforms which might best serve longer-term future needs. Finally, thanks were given to Moira Wright for overseeing the successful and smooth administration of all nine sessions this year.

Some users may have experienced problems with Turnitin between 15:01 and 16:25  on the 12 June 2014. These issues have now successfully been resolved. We apologise for the inconvenience caused by these issues, and thank you for your patience as we worked with Turnitin to correct them.

All times are for the UK (GMT or BST), for other locations please convert: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/converter.html

In July 2014 Turnitin will end its support for Internet Explorer 8.  In their message issuing they news Turnitin stated:

‘At Turnitin, we are continually improving the experience of providing rich feedback on student work. As the internet, web browsers, devices, and Turnitin all evolve, Turnitin will be ending support for Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) browser starting in July 2014.

Come July 1, 2014, we will no longer test or fix features and bugs found only in Internet Explorer 8. This does not mean that Turnitin will immediately stop working in IE8, only that we can no longer guarantee full functionality long term. We recommend that Internet Explorer 8 users move to a current version of one of these supported industry standard browsers:

Firefox | Chrome | Safari | Internet Explorer 9

With this change Turnitin will be able to move forward towards full compatibility with the touchscreen capabilities of browsers for document interaction (leaving marks and comments). Users can already navigate to certain aspects of the Turnitin service via touch, for example to submit files or modify assignment settings. For a full touch compatible grading experience, if you have an iPad, please try the Turnitin for iPad app available in the App Store for instructor use.’

At UCL we do not offer support for the use of the Turnitin iPad app however you will find a page on the Moodle Resource Centre wiki which does have some guidance and known pitfalls. We also recommend the use of Firefox over Internet Explorer currently, and this advise will not change.

There has been a prolonged period of problems with the Turnitin system, used at UCL for assignment submission, which lasted from 28 – 30 April 2014. These issues began at around 09:15 AM BST on Monday 28 April 2014, at which point the E-Learning Environments (ELE) team contacted Turnitin to confirm the issues were external to UCL. The Turnitin UK team were able to confirm that the system was experiencing intermittent global issues. They advised monitoring the updates on their Twitter feed @TurnitinStatus.

The Twitter feed was updated at least hourly, and ELE also ensured updates were posted onto the Moodle Latest News Forum (available from the My Home page on Moodle and located in a block on the right-hand side).

At approximately 02:30AM BST on Tuesday 29 April 2014 Turnitin UK resolved the issues with submission. However the issues with report generation persisted whilst they worked to clear the backlog of paper submissions. By 06:39AM BST 0n the morning of 30 April 2014 the backlog was still being processed by Turnitin’s engineers, but with most reports being generated within 2 hours of submission.

Finally at 08:10AM BST on Wednesday 30 April 2014 it was announced that Turnitin UK had recovered from the backlog with no delays.

ELE would like to thank all of the staff and students who were attempting to use the system during this time, for their patience as understanding during this external issue.

Some users may have experienced some problems with Turnitin between 13:20 and 15:25 BST on the 22nd April 2014.