CLIPP Board

Turnitin refined

Turnitin have just announced a few subtle enhancements to their tools.  The most useful for Aston are listed below;

What is reduced sensitivity for student paper matches?
In order to reduce noisy matches in the Originality Report (spurious, short matches that instructors don’t care about/ that don’t mean anything), we have raised the minimum number of words in a student paper match, added a requirement for the minimum number of non-frequently used words in a match, and lowered the amount of non-matching words that can be included in a match, the overall effect is to reduce the number of small or inconsequential matches to papers in the student paper database. This will also allow matches to primary sources like the internet and publications to rise to surface of the Originality Report source list (a common request amongst instructors).

What changes were made to the instructor inbox?
A number of small changes were made to the instructor inbox besides the addition of the “Response” column for the student GradeMark view indicator. These changes include the addition of on-hover help text for each of the column headers, expanded space for clicking on a column header to sort the inbox, a change to the GradeMark and Originality Report column headers, a change to the GradeMark icon, and a change to the downloadable file icon.

Instructor inbox Changes:

1. Hovering on a column header will display help text regarding the contents of that column
2. Clicking anywhere in a column header will sort the inbox according to the contents of that column (clicking again will reverse the sorting)
3. The column header for the Originality Report column has been changed from “Report” to “Similarity”
4. The column header for the GradeMark column has been changed from “GradeMark” to “Grade”
5. The GradeMark icon has been changed from a comment bubble and a grade or “–” (for ungraded papers) to a pencil (for ungraded papers) or the grade. Hovering on the pencil will show a message that the paper has not yet been graded
6. The downloadable file icon has been changed to a blue outline of a paper

Student Engagement: Student GradeMark view indicator

What is student GradeMark view indicator?
The student GradeMark view indicator is a feature that displays an indicator in the instructor inbox when the student has viewed the GradeMark for their paper for 30 seconds or more in one session (one viewing). If the student has viewed the paper for 30+ seconds a image of a little person with a check will appear in the new “Response” column of the instructor inbox. Hovering on the icon will display a message that the student has viewed the paper and when the latest 30+ second viewing took place. If the student has not viewed the GradeMark for the paper for 30+ seconds, a dot will appear in the “Response” column of the instructor inbox. Hovering on the dot will display a message stating that the student has not viewed the paper. The reason the student must have GradeMark open for 30+ seconds is to help ensure the student did not just open GradeMark view the grade and then close GradeMark.

P.s. If you have recently read about the new grammar checking tool (e-rater) now available, don’t hold your breath! It is only available in beta for USA customers, and selected markets.

interoperability in BB

Durham

At the recent Durham Blackboard users conference we witnessed a demonstration of the new IMS [global] Learning Tools Interface (LTI) standard. This function is now available to deploy in BB from service pack 4 release (December 2010).

This function essentially allows 3 party vendors tools to be added as seamless features into BB VLE. The IMS LTI interoperability has been created by the www.IMSglobal.org consortium. This new interoperability standard will be deployable in three levels, allowing data to be securely passed between VLEs and 3 party tools. IMS LTI is currently available in 2 flavours of functionality;

1. Basic; user authentication, course information, and role
2. Full; offers all the above + personal information, etc.

The full version is out soon, which will allow the passing of data such as grades, groups, etc, between BB and 3rd party applications.
• VLE administers have flexibility ( 3 options) controlling how the VLE connects to any external tool using the LTI functionality.
• For a full explanation of the IMS LTI functionality see video: www.vimeo.com/14100773

A presentation at the conference covered a JISC funded project (www.celtic-project.org ) which demonstrated the LTI functionality. A (service pack 4) version of BB 9.1 was linked to ELGG and WebPA (both Open Source platforms). The parameters of the link between BB and each tool took minutes to set up via LTI. When initiated by course instructors each tool appears within the VLE, with only the top frame set, and breadcrumb trail visible to the user – essentially appearing as a BB tool.

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Good CoP

from acorns.....

Creative Commons cleared image

We recently held our inaugural internal e-portfolio community of practice (ae-PiG) meeting.  The plan is to hold these on a regular basis both face to face and run an online dialogue. The online discussions will of course be using some of the tools built into PebblePad, e.g. blogs, or shared comments on specific assets.

The first meeting was well attended by representatives covering; placement roles, academic tutors, graduate employment support staff, technical support and students.  We discussed the application of e-portfolios in the current economic climate of enhancing graduate attributes, with regard to personal development planning (ePDP) and the Higher Education Achievement Record  (HEAR).

Minor technical gripes were thrashed out along with a look to the future, regarding our impending upgrade to version 2.5.  We discussed the potential of Blackboard and Turnitin “plug-ins” which are both on the horizon (summer 2011).  Enhancements such as these plug-ins promise to improve and potentially join up the core systems here at Aston, which will add value from both the teaching and students experience perspective.

Themes for future meetings were agreed as;

1)      Assessing and supporting reflective statements e.g. digital stories.

2)      Assessing (or not) the quality of submitted webfolios.

3)      Collaboration/collaborative learning  was muted as common ongoing theme for future meetings.

The next breakfast meeting is planned for mid Jan’ 2011.

On that topic, I am also involved in a JISC funded project aimed at developing and fostering a community of practice for e-portfolio pedagogies for work-based  and life-long learning through a synthesis of existing practice focusing on identifying the key principles from that practice that can be applied elsewhere.  Please join our CoP, and attend some of the live sessions due Jan’ 2011:  http://cloudworks.ac.uk/cloudscape/view/2201

Equella and the Blackboard building block

Over the last few months we have noticed what one might term to be some “short comings” in the functionality of the Blackboard building block for Equella. For those who have no idea what they are reading about right now Equella is our media repository and the building block is what allows us to place links into Blackboard to material stored within the repository. See the list below for some things that you should be aware of when adding content to Blackboard:

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