From summer 2017 Turnitin will be moving all users to their updated viewing and grading tool, Feedback Studio. Most UCL staff and students are already using Feedback Studio so will not see any change, but if you’re still using the ‘Classic’ version of the tool you will no longer have this option from late July 2017. You’ll still find the functionality you’re used to, but with an updated look and feel.

So what does Feedback Studio offer? For a quick tour of the new features of Feedback Studio, and differences with the ‘Classic’ version, you can watch the short video above from Turnitin. (NB. Multiple markers feature will not be enabled initially, and the section shown 4:00mins+ is not relevant to Turnitin through Moodle.)

Beyond being able to view and navigate similarity reports, it also offers staff a variety of ways to mark – including audio comments, rubrics and saved re-usable comments. Most of this functionality has been available to UCL staff for some time, but Turnitin have been working on the design of their interface.

For instance, selection of the wide variety of tools Turnitin offers is now done by using icons set alongside the paper for easier faster marking. You may also be looking for a ‘Save’ button, but Turnitin now saves your comments as you move between papers using the arrows in the top right of the screen.

This new version also aims to be more accessible, with viewing and grading easier on a greater variety of devices using a responsive design, as well as for those using screen readers and keyboards for navigation.

If you want to try out the new version of Feedback studio, without logging in to Moodle and setting up an assignment, you can explore an interactive demo from Turnitin.

Universities across the UK will soon be making the change as well as UCL, and we had the opportunity to hear from colleagues at the University of Kent, in partnership with Turnitin, at the recent MoodleMoot.ie conference earlier this April. They spoke of their success in moving to online marking in conjunction with the move to the new Feedback Studio, with over 70% overall of all marks now returned online. Key elements in their success were offering guidance for both staff and students (ours can be found here for staff and students), and offering repeated reminders of the change throughout the summer, so that all staff had a chance to be made aware.

If you have any concerns or questions about this change, please consult the guidance, and email digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk with any issues.

Elodie Douarin (Lecturer in Economics, UCL School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies) and I have been comparing how assessment criteria can be presented to engage a large cohort of students with feedback in Moodle Assignment and Turnitin Assignment (report now available). We took a mixed methods approach using questionnaire, focus group and student screencasts as they accessed their feedback and responded to our question prompts. Here are some our key findings.

Spoiler – we didn’t get a clear steer over which technology is (currently) better – they have different advantages. Students said Moodle seemed “better-made” (which I take to relate to theming issues rather than software architecture ones) while the tutor appreciated the expanded range of feedback available in Moodle 3.1.

Assessment criteria

• Students need an opportunity to discuss, and ideally practice with, the criteria in advance, so that they and the assessors can reach a shared view of the standards by which their work will be assessed.
• Students need to know that criteria exist and be supported to use them. Moodle Assignment is good for making rubrics salient, whereas Turnitin requires students to know to click an icon.
• Students need support to benchmark their own work to the criteria. Moodle or Turnitin rubrics allow assessors to indicate which levels students have achieved. Moreover, Moodle allows a summary comment for each criterion.
• Since students doubt that assessors refer to the criteria during marking, it is important to make the educational case for criteria (i.e. beyond grading) as a way of reaching a shared understanding about standards, for giving and receiving feedback, and for self/peer assessment.

Feedback

• The feedback comments most valued by students explain the issue, make links with the assessment criteria, and include advice about what students should do next.
• Giving feedback digitally is legible and easily accessible from any web connected device.
• Every mode of feedback should be conspicuously communicated to students and suggestions on how to cross-reference these different modes should be provided. Some thoughts should be given to ways to facilitate access to and interpretation of all the elements of feedback provided.
• Students need to know that digital feedback exists and how to access it. A slideshow of screenshots would allow tutors to hide and unhide slides depending on which feedback aspects they are using.

Effort

• The more feedback is dispersed between different modes, the more effortful it is for students to relate it to their own work and thinking. Where more than one mode is used, there is a need to distinguish between the purpose and content of each kind of feedback, signpost their relationships, and communicate this to students. Turnitin offers some support for cross referencing between bubble comments and criteria.
• It would be possible to ask students to indicate on their work which mode (out of a choice of possibilities) they would like assessors to use.
• The submission of formative assessment produced with minimal effort may impose a disproportionate burden on markers, who are likely to be commenting on mistakes that students could have corrected easily by themselves. Shorter formative assessment, group works, clearer statements of the benefits of submitting formative work may all help limiting the incidence of low-effort submissions.
• If individual summary comments have a lot in common, consider releasing them as general feedback for the cohort, spending the saved time on more student-specific comments instead. However, this needs to be signposted clearly to help students cross-reference with their individual feedback.
• As a group, teaching teams can organise a hands-on session with Digital Education to explore Moodle Assignment and Turnitin from the perspectives of students, markers and administrators. This exposure will help immeasurably with designing efficient, considerate processes and workflows.
• The kind of ‘community work’ referred to by Bloxham and colleagues (2015) would be an opportunity to reach shared understandings of the roles of students and markers with respect to criteria and feedback, which would in turn help to build confidence in the assessment process.

Bloxham, S., den-Outer, B., Hudson, J., Price, M., 2015. Let’s stop the pretence of consistent marking: exploring the multiple limitations of assessment criteria. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 1–16. doi:10.1080/02602938.2015.1024607

The Moodle summer upgrade will take place between the 22nd – 27th July 2016. During this process Moodle will see a number of improvements and new features.

These include an enhanced grading interface for PDF submission in Moodle assignments, a new Turnitin marking interface (called Feedback Studio) and the ability to pin discussion in forums.

If you would like to read more please see the New Features page in the Moodle Resource Centre wiki.

The UCL E-Learning Baseline is now available as a printable colour booklet. This can be downloaded from the UCL E-Learning Baseline wiki page: http://bit.ly/UCLELearningBaseline

The 2016 version is a product of merging the UCL Moodle Baseline with the Student Minimum Entitlement to On-Line Support from the Institute of Education.

The Digital Education Advisory team will be distributing printed copies to E-Learning Champions and Teaching Administrators for use in departments.

Please could you also distribute this to your own networks to help us communicate the new guidelines to all staff.

Support is available to help staff apply this to their Moodle course templates via digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk.

We are also working on a number of ideas to help people understand the baseline (via a myth busting quiz) and a way for people to show their courses are Baseline (or Baseline+) compliant by way with a colleague endorsed badge.

See ‘What’s new?’, to quickly see what has changed since the last 2013 Baseline.

As you may or may not know there is a lot of information on Digital Education and our services in the UCL wiki pages, including Moodle Resource Centre, Lecturecast Resource Centre or the MyPortfolio Resource Centre.

However, there are some resources you might not know about, such as the UCL Student E-Learning Services – which provides useful guidance for students on how to do things such as submit work and interact with Lecturecast recordings.

We also have a couple of pages that we use to update you, that you might want to ‘watch’. By watching a page on the UCL wiki you will get updates when it is changed. Think of it like subscribing to the page for updates. Just log into the wiki and then navigate to the page you want to watch. There you will find a ‘watch’ button in the top right, alongside the page title.

Digital Education pages to watch:

New Feature – We use this page to post about changes to Moodle whenever we carry out an upgrade. A lot of the time these changes are behind the scenes, so we don’t detail these. Instead we link to the official Moodle release notes for anyone who is particularly interested in the exact details. If there is anything notable that has changed this will be listed on the page. You will also notice that there are sub-pages dedicated to each of our summer upgrades. As these tend to be larger upgrades, with more changes we have dedicated spaces to detail all of these changes. ‘Watch’ the New Features page to get notifications when we update the page after a Moodle upgrade.

Turnitin: Service Status and Known Issues – This page is a great resource for anyone who uses Turnitin. The Turnitin: Service Status and Known Issues page can be used to monitor the state of Turnitin, and is the best place to check if you suspect there might be a problem with the system. There is an embedded version of Turnitin’s own service status Twitter feed, which is where they will post of any outages. The Twitter feed is somewhere Digital Education have to check ourselves as well, so it’s good to check. There is also a table of Known Issues, which we are currently working with Turnitin to resolve. This includes details of any workarounds that can be used whilst the problem is fixed. Additionally you will find a Turnitin Quirks table, this is a list of features in Turnitin that are working as intended but perhaps not as desired by some users. We would also recommend you ‘watch this page’ (see steps above) to be among the first to know if there are any problems with the Turnitin system.

Earlier this month it was announced that during the Moodle summer upgrade UCL will be moving to a single version of Turnitin, as Turnitin v1 assignments will no longer be supported by Moodle or Turnitin.

To help ease this transition we will be preventing the creation of new assignments using the Turnitin v1 activity on Tuesday 22^nd March.

After this date, students will continue to be able to submit to existing Turnitin v1 assignments, but it will not be possible for Tutors and Course Administrators to create new Turnitin v1 assignments.

This decision has been taken to prevent anyone accidentally setting up an assignment with Turnitin v1 that will then not work after the 27^th July 2016 (when we complete the Moodle upgrade).

If you need to set up a new Turnitin assignment after the 22^nd March 2016, please use the Turnitin v2 activity.

Instructions on how to set up an assignment with Turnitin v2 can be found in the UCL Moodle Resource Centre wiki.