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Turnitin updates

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I recently attended the International Turnitin User Group meeting on Monday 16th July at the Sage in Gateshead (see picture). This was held just before the start of the 5th International Plagiarism Conference, so there was a healthy attendance. This was quite a unique event, in which the whole iParadigms management team were present, to answer a whole raft of questions posed prior to, and during the session.
Given the recent UK outages, the Q&A sessions were quite civilised, with some very useful questions being posed about the direction of the company and its suite of products.  On that note, Lucy Cave a Phd researcher here at Aston – gave a presentation on her latest findings. Lucy’s presentation was reported in their local paper, which covered student’s attitudes/understanding towards plagiarism and collusion. This raises further questions about student use and support of the WriteCheck tool.

Dr Christian Storm, Chief Technology Officer and last remaining founder of Turnitin covered their current research projects. These include;

•  Improving the audio feedback length of time (from the current 3 minutes), and the ability to embed the audio feedback into a pdf download,

• Continual refinement of their algorithms to ensure fewer noisy matches and false positives, as a result of the growing paper database of papers and indexed internet matches,
• Tackling translated paraphrasing as a form of plagiarism,
• Support for right to left languages (e.g. Arabic),
• Advanced phrase exclusion, so that particular phrases or “boilerplate” text  can be excluded from reports by assignment or all assignments.
• Stylometrics, which can identify changes in writing style, which will help address the problem of identifying students employing ghost writers. This was mentioned in relation to the new e-rater tool which is still in the testing phase, and requires further refinement,
• New “role types are to be developed, i.e. reviewers and viewers.
• And finally he mentioned developments into extracting text from “scanned” pdf files using new OCR methods.

In my view, the statement that had the most impact by Dr Storm was his reinforcement that the underlying purpose of Turnitin is as a teaching and learning tool, used to improve student academic writing skills. NOT just as a “checking” tool. This was reassuring to hear from a founder member – and underpins my ethos of this tool.

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Effective e-Portfolio use at Aston University

Connecting the Eportfolio Community : Copyright Alison Miller

In this blog post I report on two different uses of e-portfolios (PebblePad) here at Aston University.  Both have similar stories to tell, in respect of the methods the academic staff have used to scaffold and support student’s reflective evidence, and their methods of teaching critical reflective writing. Finally we ask the question of how they assess reflective portfolio evidence.   I should also direct your attention to five new enlightening JISC produced video case studies on e-Portfolio use across UK HE and FE: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/eportimplement .

Now it’s time for a serious look at the new and improved PebblePad 3– following the recent unveiling by the PebblePad team.

Dr Roy Smith: Combined Honours

At our recent Aston e-Portfolio interest group (ae-pig) meeting we had the pleasure of talking to Dr Roy Smith  (former Director of Combined Honours).  Dr Smith was invited to talk about his use of e-portfolios for the combined honours cohorts in recent years.  Dr Smith has been using PebblePad to allow students to build up evidence of skills and competences beginning in year 02.  Students are encouraged and guided (using a template webfolio) to continually reflect upon their experiences. They continually create a body of evidence that displays their development during their undergraduate studies and work placements.

In the initial stages of using PebblePad Dr Smith provided little scaffolding (with Pebblepad), but soon found this to be counter-productive to effective learning and their grasp on the importance of a reflective journal.  The lessons he learned echo others adoption of e-portfolios, namely;

• Provide initial support for the students. This ensured they understood the longer term employability benefits of using an e-Portfolio as a “living” document.
• Use simple scaffolding mechanisms to provide a framework for collated evidence, i.e. webfolio. Dr Smith utilised the skills and competences frameworks provide by our careers department for this purpose.
• Promote and provide effective reflective (academic) writing skills. In his case Dr Smith used the work of Dr Jenny Moon , by running writing workshops.
• Use secure gateways to manage large cohort reflective assessments.
• Add weighted assessment grades to both the live journal and the final CV parts.
• Final assessment of the journal ensured that students displayed evidence of higher order thinking skills, by collating and synthesising critical incidents. The critical reflections on their developing skills and competencies would therefore help guide them in their chosen careers.

Dr Smith concluded his talk by commenting upon another portfolio he implemented for an area of lecturing he covers. This is a paper based portfolio, and is extremely successful with the students recording lab experiments and field tests.  Fitness for purpose is the key here for “technology” or lack of in this instance. Don’t let the technology dictate the learning and teaching.

Whilst discussing the evasive subject of both teaching and assessing reflective writing, Dr Errol Thompson proffered an alternative method of defining assessment criteria; using the depth, width , and journey framework . This utilises the SOLO taxonomy   by Biggs and Collis (1982)

•  See also the International Journal of e-Portfolio (volume 2 number 1) which contains papers covering assessment.

Dr Ann Hartley: The Aston Certificate

At our previous ae-pig meeting in November 2011 we invited along Dr Ann Hartley to discuss how she uses and assesses the reflective aspects of student portfolios for the Aston Certificate:  An Introduction to Learning and Teaching in Higher Education.

Recently, this programme has adopted the use of PebblePad to enable students to reflect upon their teaching practice, for both continual and final assessment – using a web based platform.  Dr Hartley has been involved with the Aston Certificate for quite a while now, and has embraced the potential of continual (developmental) and critical reflection afforded by a web based tool such as PebblePad.
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Turnitin – turnitup!

Turnitin; our text matching tool of choice are currently beta testing two new additions to their ever growing suite of features:

First is the direct integration – useful for those (like us) who have Turnitin fully integrated with their VLE.    We will be joining the beta testing process in the near future. I am attending a demonstration of this next week, and will report back soon.

Secondly is the beta release of translated paraphrasing. This relatively new method of converting text into different languages – then back into English, can be now be “checked” to detect this practice.

Training news

Turnitin are also  running a series awareness sessions running during February and March, covering a wide range of academic misconduct and plagiarism topics. Most are free, and can be attended via an online webinar. Find out more and book onto these here: http://community.turnitin.com/events/event_list.asp

ALT-C 2011 musings

Miguel Brechner opened the conference by discussing his 1 laptop per child project (Plan Ceibal). This had the desired effect of inspiring us to think about the positive effect technology can have on learning, and also managed to focus our minds on “doing more with less” in this challenging climate.
Various sessions were live streamed, and delegates interviewed for sound bites during the conference . Inevitably, the twitter back channels kept those peeking in, informed of our thoughts.  Brian Kelly (UKOLN) and Martin Hawksey (MASHe)   helped to archive the tweets using Twapper Keeper. The associated Summarizr makes a neat job of aggregating and displaying those archived tweets.
As you can expect, after not attending ALT-C  for a few years, I was keen to fill up the days with interesting sessions.  My highlights were:

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electronic feedback

In this short video CLIPP, Dr Stuart Wallis explains how he and his students have benefitted from the GradeMark tool, when using it to assess work and give timely feedback.

See also my notes on the  presentation  by Dr Cath Ellis we posted earlier in the year.

Supporting learning

Dr Matthew Olczack explains how he used, and  subsequently researched web based resources to enhance traditional teaching and learning methods.  The research is of particular interest as Dr Olczack investigates aspects of self selection bias.  The overall results were very favourable, both in terms of the postive impact upon students learning, and their overall achievements.

e-portfolio reflections

PebblePad Mobile

Our final e-portfolio interest group (ae-pig) meeting of the year was held this week, where we reflected upon the year with e-portfolios here at Aston. Dr Matthew Hall (Business) and Dr Fiona Lacy (Pharmacy) spoke at length about designing and refining programmes to ensure frequent and reflective work could be elicited form their students. Dr Hall has been using PebblePad on a new programme this year, and explained how he intends to refine the assessment process to make use of PebblePad features such as the Gateway archive to encourage (frequent) personal reflective statements. Dr Lacy explained how she uses the Profile tool to map evidence against a professional standards framework. We all agreed the crux of effective teaching and engaging learning with a tool such as PebblePad, was leaner scaffolding (webfolio templates), frequent feedback (including peer), and teaching reflection using recognised frameworks, i.e. Driscoll. Dr Hall and Dr Lacy are also embarking upon designing new resources to include soft/employment skills into their programmes – assisted by Steve Thompson from the Careers & Employability Centre.

We finished the meeting discussing PebblePad+ out next year and it’s imminent integration with Blackboard and Turnitin.

We should also finish this post by congratulating PebblePad for winning Shropshire “company of the Year”.

Online marking tips

During testing of the range of tools available within the Turnitin suite of tools, I set up the new rubric manager tool.  This allows you to create a set of rubrics for a given assignment and easily apply them to student scripts.  Together with the GradeMark comment banks, this new rubric tool can really save time , and ensure a consistent marking schema is applied.  It was simple to set up and link to to the existing assignment.  Ideal for teams of markers and second marking to ensure that all involved are utilising the same rubrics – all contained within the Turnitin library.  The PeerMark tool also has allows a quite complex set of peer marking scenarios, thus complementing the GradeMark and Orginality checker.  Turnitin continue to expand the product base into a very useful set of online marking/feedback tools, helping to save academic staff valuable time.  This approach also ensures a consistent quality of service can be delivered across programmes, creating a level plaing field for online marking and feedback.

When you link Turnitin with Blackboard (our VLE) as we have, you now have the potential for paperless marking – as the results get fed into the GradeCentre. These can be subsequently be uploaded into the registry system.

I thought I’d finish this post by linking to a short video by Professor Curtis Bonk, which highlights the need for academia to adopt a holistic and pragmatic approach to detering plagiarism and collsuion.

GradeMark – nose to tail

The presentation given by Dr Cath Ellis here at Aston last week really illustrated how the GradeMark tool (part of Turnitin) can be used as an effective feedback and diagnostic tool.  Before I delve into the way Dr Ellis has been using GradeMark in quite innovative ways, I should first mention the overarching e-marking/e-submission strategies at Huddersfield. I’ll also share with you our own Aston University guidance notes for those considering larger scale adoption of using Turnitin, to complement exisitng academic misconduct procedures.

The University of Huddersfield is four years into an e-submission policy that allows for paper submission alongside those who want to adopt e-submission methods. They chose Turnitin to fulfil the needs of both e-submission and text matching.  This thoughtful rollout process caters for the nurture and support of early adopters, and also supports for those who still want (and need) to use paper.  This parallel process ensures that organic (peer driven) growth is supported, whilst ensuring no one is alienated or marginalised.   The new student body is also pivotal in the process of pushing for greater use of e-marking and e-feedback.  A print contract with a local firm means that scripts can be bulk downloaded from Turnitin and sent to the printer for paper copies within 24 hours – at a competitive cost. Therefore the onus is not placed on the student to print out paper versions. This means that everyone can use Turnitin to submit, and then outsource the printed versions for those whom still prefer to mark on paper. The print process is still an overhead to consider, but their outsourcing contract does offer a more flexible and innovative approach.

Just as important as this outsourced print contract, is the streamlined workflow process. The entire process is being continually monitored and refined to ensure that administrative bottlenecks can be gradually eliminated from the entire submission /marking process, leaving support staff to concentrate on other tasks.  Dr Ellis refers to this important factor as a “nose to tail workflow.”
So we have a number of important facets pivotal to the large scale adoption;
1)    A university wide e-submission  policy
2)    Continual refinement of administrative workflow processes
3)    Methods that ensure that e-submission and paper marking can happily coexist
4)    Early adopters that can share the vision
5)    Pressure from the students to adopt more flexible practices

Dr Ellis demonstrated the use of the (drag and drop) GradeMark rubrics as an efficient way of adding comments to student scripts, which helps to ensure a consistent quality of feedback for all. Sometimes she used a fairly lengthy comment saved in her own list of rubrics, thus eliminating the need to rewrite feedback, common to particular mistakes.  But the most impressive use of GradeMark was the ability to download and analyse the comments left on entire cohort’s scripts to diagnose recurring problems.

This diagnostic aspect (see graphs in presentation) of analysing the frequency of rubrics enabled Dr Ellis to plan teaching interventions based upon a higher frequencies of for example a particular grammatical misinterpretation. By downloading the frequencies of rubrics and displaying them as simple histograms (see above), Dr Ellis was able to quickly pinpoint recurring problems across and between academic years.

“..go into your inbox and click on GradeMark Report which is next to the roster synch button. You can then drill down to the grademarks and export the data as excel files.”

The last tip Dr Ellis demonstrated was the shortcut method (see above) to overlay the originality report over the GradeMark screen. This means that whilst you are marking online and providing feedback, you can be checking the script for text matches highlighted – all on the same screen. Time saving indeed!

JISC 2011 conference

A short report on the JISC 2011 conference,  of which you can revisit some of the live streamed sessions and grab the virtual goody bag.  The keynote speech by Professor Eric Thomas, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Bristol, contextualised our current shift in HE provision to an unavoidable consumer lead market model. The twitter back channel displayed next to the recorded videos makes for a useful resource, and a glimpse into personal reflections on the day. Maybe they should have used the tool created by Martin Hawksey (JISC) which enables Twitter feeds to by overlaid onto video?

Ironically, one of the most interesting sessions I attended – “amplifying events” run by Brian Kelly of UKOLN was not officially recorded – but Brian and colleague did record it on their iphones (see above). This session was a good overview of some of the techniques and tools available to event organisers to enhance F2F and blend them with online events – as JISC demonstrated his year. The green meeting guide, was also mentioned – which looks a useful resource. As does this article by  Marike Guy (co-presenter) entitled “10 ways to amplify your event.” This topic also resonates with my previous post on using Elluminate here at Aston to help with our sustainability agenda.

The session entitled “Using digital media to improve teaching and learning”, illustrated some interesting exemplars of effective practice at University of Bristol focussing on the role of students as producers of media rich learning content. This session was fronted by JISC Digital Media service, reminding me of their wealth of excellent resources.

I also attended a short workshop explaining the Co-generative (Co-genT) toolkit project, which guides you through the process of writing learning outcomes. These can then be exported from the Moodle toolkit into PebblePad. Very handy for course designers, and could also be used to assess activities. n.b a great deal of work has been done on this tool  to map outcomes/descriptive verbs against national standards.

The final session I want to comment on was entitled “Pushing the frontiers of ‘open education and research“.  This session outlined two new tools created by Plymouth University and The Academy. They will be extremely useful for people wanting to easily understand copyright and create OER resources. Both will be live in a week or so. I’ll wait until they go live to report back, as I will be using them myself.