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An Improvement to Similarity Scoring
By Domi C Sinclair, on 11 February 2016
The way the originality report is calculated in Turnitin will be changing slightly. We have received the following email from Turnitin:
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Hi,
At Turnitin, we appreciate the importance of the Originality Report, and we are constantly seeking to deliver more reliable matches and a comprehensive Originality Report to our users.
What’s changing?
Starting in March, when bibliographic material is excluded from an Originality Report, we will recalculate the Similarity Score based on the remaining content only. This update will provide you with a more accurate score.
What does this mean?
As an example, this means that by opting to exclude a bibliography that constitutes 10% of a paper, we will now generate a report according to 90% of that paper, rather than calculating reports out of 100%.
How will this affect my assignments?
For assignments that have not yet passed their due date, all reports will automatically regenerate in line with the improvement. Rest assured that reports for closed assignments will not be updated. If you have open assignments, we advise logging in to check regenerated reports, as this update may cause a slight increase to a paper’s Similarity Score.
How can I ensure that all Originality Reports are aligned with this improvement?
If you’d prefer that all existing reports are aligned with our update (specifically for papers submitted to current assignments), you can simply opt to regenerate reports from the Document Viewer.
If I extend the due date for a closed assignment, will this affect current Originality Reports?
By extending a closed assignment’s due date – therefore reopening the assignment – all reports in the assignment will regenerate to align with our update.
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This update is not controlled by UCL and will be implemented by Turnitin outside of our control. However if you do have any concerns you’d like us to pass along to Turnitin then please let us know and we can do this for you.
From Bricks to Clicks: the potential for learning analytics
By Steve Rowett, on 9 February 2016
I’ve blogged previously about the work that Jisc are doing in the field of learning analytics. Whilst there are some good case studies within the sector, informal conversations have indicated that most institutions are really only at the start of their analytics journey, or even simply keeping a watching brief on how the sector as a whole will act. Where institutions do have systems in place, they are often based on quite limited data sources (typically attendance data, VLE usage or library usage) rather than more holistic data sets covering a range of student experiences.
A comprehensive picture of the current state of play is provided by From Bricks to Clicks: the Potential of Data and Analytics in Higher Education, a Higher Education Commission report which summarises the field and provides recommendations to institutions. A small number of pioneering institutions (Nottingham Trent, Open, Edinburgh) feature heavily as case studies, but the general argument is that universities are generating significant amounts of data about learning but are not yet in a position to use this data to support student success.
At UCL, early discussions around the use of analytics have started. Our retention rates are generally good, but there is a feeling that students may leave their course due to social or economic factors – perhaps living in poor accommodation, feeling isolated, having financial difficulties or commuting into London. We think we might need quite a large dataset to model these parameters (if they can be modelled at all) although it is possible that attendance would be a good proxy for them. Certainly our journey into learning analytics is only just beginning.
2016 Horizon Report
By Clive Young, on 5 February 2016
It’s that time of year again. Every year the NMC Horizon Report examines emerging technologies for their potential impact on and use in teaching, learning, and ‘creative inquiry’ within the environment of higher education.
The report, downloadable in PDF, is compiled by an international body of experts and provides a useful checklist trends, challenges and technologies in the field and provides a useful benchmark of what is most talked about at the moment.
The key trends identified in the in the short term are
- Growing focus on measuring learning
- Increasing use of blended learning designs
Longer term trends are: advancing cultures of innovation, rethinking how institutions work, redesigning learning spaces and a shift to deeper learning approaches.
Key ‘solvable’ challenges are the same as last year
- Blending formal and informal learning
- Improving digital literacy
More difficult challenges are; competing models of education (e.g. competency-based education in the US), personalising learning, balancing our connected and unconnected lives and of course keeping education relevant. “Rewarding teaching”, from last year seems to have been, ahem, solved.
The important developments in educational technology they identify are in the short term are
- Bring your own device (BYOD), same a last year
- Learning analytics and adaptive learning
Longer-term innovations are; augmented and virtual reality, makerspaces, affective computing (interpreting/simulating human emotions) and robotics.
As usual there are useful commentaries and links throughout. Once again, encouraging that quite a few of these ideas are already being implemented, trialed and discussed here at UCL.
Summer Works – New Data Centre, Moodle Snapshot and Upgrade.
By Domi C Sinclair, on 3 February 2016
This year UCL Information Services Division (ISD) is closing one of its data centres in London and relocating the technology and services that run from that location to a new state of the art facility in Slough. This is a major undertaking by ISD and nearly all services from finance and HR through to the Digital Education services such as Moodle, Lecturecast and MyPortfolio are impacted.
In order to complete this exercise all Digital Education services will be required to have a limited period of downtime to make the switch from one location to another.
To ensure we minimise the downtime and to avoid two shut-down dates, we intend to combine the migration exercise with our normal yearly upgrade and snapshot process.
As you may be aware from previous years, we normally advertise a period of 5 days of possible outage for our major Moodle upgrade (Friday evening till Wednesday Morning). This year we intend that this period will remain unchanged and that we will complete both the snapshot, upgrade and the data centre migration within the 5 day period. It will be our intention to restore services as early as possible within this 5 day window.
Moodle Snapshot and Upgrade
In response to the survey that went out to all our Moodle course tutors and administrators asking for your least inconvenient downtime window we had 201 respondents, I thank all of your who responded for doing so.
There is never going to be one date that is ideal for all users, however the survey does highlight the dates which would appear to have the least impact for the most number of users. We have also run internal reports within Moodle to identify the period with the least or no current Moodle/Turnitin submissions planned.
The selected date range is from: 6pm Friday 22nd July > 12pm Wednesday 27th July 2016
Please let me make it clear that the period that students will be without ANY access to Moodle will be less than 24 hours (Friday evening > Saturday lunch time). This is the time taken for the team to create the Snapshot which is then made immediately available.
The Snapshot is a complete copy of the live Moodle and provides students with “read only” access to ALL of the material they had prior to the snapshot being taken.
What the Snapshot does not provide is the ability for students to take part in activities, add to or change Moodle for example the following activities cannot be done:-
- Submission of assignments via either Moodle or Turnitin
- Quiz based activity
- Posting new forum topics or replies
Please take account of this when planning Moodle activities during this period.
After the Snapshot is made available there will be a period of time when the current, live version of Moodle is unavailable to allow for the upgrade and migration to take place. During this time, students will be immediately redirected to this version upon entering the normal Moodle URL.
The publicised outage will be until 12pm Wednesday 27th July, as this “at risk period” is required in case any issues arise. The “at risk period” should be treated as if the service were unavailable and no Moodle dependant activities planned for that period.
If the chosen date range affects your course significantly in regard to Moodle usage that cannot be resolved by the use Snapshot e.g. a critical assignment submission or Moodle Exam date that cannot be altered, please contact us at digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk and we will work with you to provide the best possible alternative solution for your requirements.
Join us on CMALT 2016 – UCL’s popular digital education certificate
By Clive Young, on 27 January 2016
Do you use Moodle, Turnitin, Lecturecast, Opinio, My Portfolio, the UCL Wiki? Do you use Email, text, Facebook to contact students, do you read or contribute to blogs or Twitter etc. or use other technologies to support the student learning experience?
If so, why not try UCL UCL’s professional portfolio in e-learning?
Now in its fifth year at UCL, CMALT is a chance to learn about, share and implement good practice in the wide range of technologies that support our students’ teaching and learning.
“Working together with colleagues from across UCL was helpful in terms of discovering and developing good practice”.
CMALT is a national peer-based professional accreditation scheme developed by the Association for Learning Technology (ALT) and an opportunity to certify your growing skills and experience in learning technology.
- What does it involve?
Completion of a descriptive and reflective portfolio of about 3,000 words, demonstrating your knowledge in four core areas: operational issues (constraints/benefits of different technologies, technical knowledge and deployment); teaching, learning and/or assessment processes; the wider context of legislation, policies and standards and communication/working with others, plus one specialist option subject. We will run monthly workshops to discuss and work on the core areas of your portfolio, and provide you with a mentor from our team to support you as you complete your certification portfolio.
- How long does it take?
It takes about six months from start to submission and it takes around 25-35 hours in all to complete including around 15 hours contact time. The 2016 cohort will start in February 2016.
- How much does it cost?
It costs £120 to register as a CMALT candidate under the UCL scheme (normally £150). In many cases the candidate’s department covers this fee.
This is an excellent opportunity to support your professional development with lots of support available.
There will be a lunch time meeting to provide further information for prospective participants next week on Wednesday 3rd February 2016 from 1pm-2pm in Chandler House, room 118. All staff are welcome. If you are interested in CMALT but unable to attend this meeting please contact a.gilry@ucl.ac.uk
Introducing Digital Education – the new name for E-learning Environments.
By Fiona Strawbridge, on 21 January 2016
We’ve changed our name! RIP E-Learning Environments; welcome to the world, Digital Education!
Why have we done this?
Our remit has broadened in the last year as the IT Training team has joined us, so Digital Education better reflects the scope of the whole team’s work. The
Image credit Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com
name change also aligns better with our institutional Education strategy. More broadly, ‘digital this’, ‘digital that’ and ‘digital the other’ seem to be replacing IT, ICT and e- in common parlance and our sister teams in ISD have also now renamed for 2016 – Creative Media Services are now Digital Media, and Web & Mobile Services are now Digital Presence.
What does it mean for your services and support?
There have been no changes to the teams or the brilliant support from us that you have all be accustomed to. Only the names of the teams have changed:
- Digital Education Core Services (formerly E-Learning Services)
- Digital Education Advisory (formerly E-Learning Advisory)
- Digital Education Futures (formerly E-Learning Developments)
- IT Training (watch this space – name change coming…)
- Learning Spaces
If you need to contact us to get support, our email is now digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk (this replaces ele@ucl.ac.uk)
Our blog is now: https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/digital-education/
And we’re still wading through our website editing links, but for now you can still go to http://www.ucl.ac.uk/isd/services/learning-teaching/elearning-staff to find out more about the team and our services.
What’s next?
Of course changes like this take a while to bed in – we still catch ourselves referring to ELE, and we’re having to update lots of links and documentation (ok – there have been quite a few unforeseen consequences!) But we are very pleased to bring in the new year with our new name.
For now, we hope the change to Digital Education acts as a reminder that digital technologies are woven into the fabric of the way students learn and teachers teach as well as our institutional strategies. We continue to look forward to working together by blending the digital with education and making UCL excel at delivering world class teaching and learning to its students for many years to come.