A Cross-School Multidisciplinary Forum for Promoting, Supporting and Celebrating Excellence and Innovation in Education and Technology at Newcastle University Business School
As a number of our teams get used to the more advanced functionality of the tools we have for education recording, it becomes apparent that our Tools like Panopto can’t do things like split screening and other more advanced functionality. Our very own Prof. Nils Braakmann has therefore written a very helpful guide on getting to grips with OBS Studio, a free application which allows for more advanced features.
Prior to April this year my experience of using Turnitin was limited to attending the training courses organised by NUBS and run by LTDS mainly as the modules i taught were assessed through 100% end of course exams. I had no practical hands-on experience of how to set up or mark using Turnitin.
The reality of having to use Turnitin for the upcoming 24 hour take home exams led me to find a way of marking summative exams online that was both pragmatic and gave me the basic statistical information I needed. This short blog is intended to disseminate how I mark with Turnitin through two short videos and provide links where further information can be found.
My first video shows the type of submissions we are likely to get in A&F (being a mixture of some type, some scanned images, some cut and pasted Excel) and how I marked them using QuickMarks.
This method of using QuickMarks within Turnitin to create a bank of marks that i could ‘drag and drop’ was fine but it meant I had a lot of manual adding up to do and it did not give me a breakdown of marks per question or section unless I kept a separate spreadsheet. As a consequence I looked for a solution to this and found Grading Form.
My second video shows how I use Grading Form to reduce the amount of manual additions and also remove the need for keeping a separate spreadsheet. The Grading Form can be set up so that a mark can be entered for as many questions and sub questions as required and then Turnitin will automatically add these up to give a total. In addition, a spreadsheet can be exported with the mark per question or sub question detail. The Grading Form can be attached to an assessment and then is available for all scripts submitted. Please note care is needed with this as a Grading Form should only be attached once to an assessment. If a second Grading Form is attached to the same assessment then any prior marking done on that assessment will be deleted.
Unfortunately there is no LTDS screencast on Grading Form at present but LTDS are running regular webinars and hold regular drop in sessions where they are happy to answer any queries – i know because i have used them a lot!
Happy to help with queries but also don’t forget LTDS are the experts in this and are very friendly!
A Newcastle University Business School we have full access to all the Business and Management talks on HSTalks. This is a useful additional resource for students that can add considerable depth to the digital resources that they have available. To summarise the resource provides access to video lectures and case studies delivered by qualified academics or practitioners. The videos can be directly embedded into Blackboard or Canvas, and there’s a very useful guide which shows you how to do this.
I’ve put together a short overview videoof the HSTalks, which goes into basic functions and how to insert the content into Blackboard in a few easy steps. Please do leave below any comments or feedback that you may have about the resource below and your use of it.
Bob, Box of Broadcasts, or Learning on Screen (they’ve gone by many names over the years) is a tool which I’ve used for a number of years on my modules. As a resource , when you pick the right programmes and documentaries, it can add considerable depth to the resources available to students to contextualise the subject matter you’ve been exploring in lectures and seminars.
The main benefits of using BoB is that all the material is pre-validated for teaching use so there’s no tiresome checking with the library for permissions etc. If it’s available on BoB it can be inserted into your module as a teaching resource. Possibly more useful for a generation used to Youtube and iPlayer, the BoB controls are highly intuitive.
BoB themselves are continuously improving the site and over the last 2 years have added much better VLE integration, so it’s possible if you’ve reviewed this resource before and found it “clunky” it could have had a sizeable improvement since then.
Some of the most useful improvements (which will also carry over to Canvas) is the improved share options which BoB now has. Including one of the share options being a direct iframe code which can be inserted straight into a VLE. This user friendliness means that with a very short copy and paste into the VLE you can add a video using an pre-setup embed code. WAYFless Links are also available to speed students directly to the resource (see some useful Youtube’s below from the Learning Technology Development team of Edge Hill University).
One of my favourite uses of the resource is to set up playlists for students which will lead them to a range of resources from which they can pick from.
In terms of integration with the learning experience I’ve used this resource in a number of ways including getting students to watch documentaries and write reflective blogs comparing and contrasting what we’ve taught them in the classroom with their views after watching some real world practise. I’ve also used it in a flipped classroom technique for a seminar, where students were to watch after a lecture a documentary on Mercedes’s merger with Chrysler, and the seminar was very much them debating the issues arising.
The downsides of the resource are that it can take a little time to curate and find the videos you want. There is a little set-up time here. A quick time saver can be though to search through other peoples playlists in the search function, you can do this by selecting “search public playlists” on the search function instead of just searching programmes. The last downside is that while it does have a great deal, it doesn’t have everything. I’m still waiting for Enron: Smartest Guys in the Room to show up sometime.
Academic research which has been published regarding the integration of BoB into the curriculum is sparse (and potentially an area for pedagogic research). However JISC have published some insightful guides on using video in teaching and learning, within their larger “Using digital media in new learning models” guide. My favourite part of the guide being one of my favourite views of the use of technology in teaching overall:
Please do leave a comment below if you yourself have had any positive/negative experiences with BoB, or would like to share any further resources or help guides associated with this resource.
