A big thank you to all the staff who have signed up to the Blackboard Assignment with SafeAssign pilot. There’s still time to volunteer if you are interested (email elearning@aber.ac.uk).
Since the last blog post, we have made SafeAssign available for use in Blackboard Assignments. We have also held the first two training sessions. More training sessions will be organised for semester one – visit the Events and Training page to book a place.
We’ve been exploring some of the options for marking in Blackboard Assignment that staff might find useful:
Delegated marking allows staff to mark essays by group. If you divide up marking in your modules between several members of staff, then delegated marking will help you.
Parallel marking allows two staff to mark a piece of work independently without seeing each other’s comments or marks.
Anonymous comments. By default, marking comments in Blackboard Assignment contain the name of the staff member marking. If this is not appropriate for your marking, you can make them anonymous (see below).
Please note that deleted Blackboard assignments can be recovered for up to 30 days after deletion. If you need deleted assignments restored, please contact elearning@aber.ac.uk as soon as possible, providing details of module and the assignment name.
Anonymous Comments
When you create a comment, click on the anonymous marking icon
You can edit existing comments to make them anonymous by clicking on the comment. Click on the three dots in the top right-hand corner of the comment and then click on Anonymous.
To help your students use Blackboard Assignment to submit their work and find their feedback, we strongly recommend that you include the following FAQs in Assessment and Feedback Learning Module in your Blackboard course:
We are looking for volunteers to evaluate an alternative to Turnitin for text-matching and marking. This alternative is called SafeAssign. SafeAssign is part of Blackboard.
Training will be provided, and support will be available during the semester from e-learning support staff. We will ask everyone taking part in the evaluation to complete a short online survey before and after the trial. We will also invite you to a meeting at the end of the semester to share your experiences.
Please read the information below about this evaluation which will help you decide whether you would like to take part. If you want more information or would like to volunteer, please contact elearning@aber.ac.uk
What is SafeAssign?
SafeAssign is a text-matching tool provided by Blackboard. It is included in our main Blackboard licence. SafeAssign is an alternative to Turnitin.
Why are we evaluating it?
AU used SafeAssign before we started using Turnitin. As part of our commitment to making sure that we are using the best tools available, we would like to evaluate whether SafeAssign would be appropriate for text-matching. This evaluation has been approved by the Academic Enhancement Committee (May 2024).
What will be different if I use SafeAssign instead of Turnitin?
Some aspects of marking and submission will be changed:
New submission, marking and text-matching tools
A different database of assignments and sources for text-matching. This database won’t include previous years’ submissions from AU.
You’ll see some new features:
Text highlighting
Welsh language interface for submission and marking
View and retrieve previous student submissions
And some features will not be available:
You will need to post marks manually rather setting a release date and time. However, this will give you a little more control over when marks are made available to students.
Submit on behalf of students
Switch off anonymous marking for individual students
Rubrics and quick marks can’t be exported from Turnitin, although similar tools are available in Blackboard.
Full details of the features of both Turnitin and SafeAssign are available.
Welsh language
All elements of this evaluation will be available in both Welsh and English. This includes help guides, training, support, and evaluation. SafeAssign itself is translated as part of Anthology’s commitment to Welsh. Welsh language text is including in the text-matching service.
What will I have to do if I volunteer?
We strongly recommend that modules included in the evaluation use SafeAssign use the tool for all e-submissions during the duration of the module. This helps both staff and students become familiar with SafeAssign rather than swapping between multiple submission and marking tools.
All staff involved in the submission, marking and moderation for the module will have to use SafeAssign (note that this includes external examiners). If you volunteer a module that has multiple staff marking on it, please make sure that they are all aware, and have all received appropriate training (see below). We will provide all external examiners with information about the evaluation.
We strongly recommend that you provide a practice submission for your students before their first assignment. This will make sure that they know how to use SafeAssign correctly. We will provide guides and FAQs for students which you can link to from the Assessment and Feedback area of your Blackboard course.
What training and support will be available?
We will publish guides and FAQs for staff and students on the LTEU website. We will also run training sessions on how to create submission points and how to mark. Full support will be available to staff and students throughout the term.
How will it impact my students?
Submission will be different for students; one advantage of using SafeAssign is that students will get an email receipt. Students will also see their feedback in a slightly different way. We will provide full support for students.
Can I talk to someone about this?
Contact elearning@aber.ac.uk for information and to discuss whether SafeAssign is appropriate for your module.
The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit would like to highlight four enhancements to Instructors from the October Blackboard Learn Ultra.
1. Partial credit auto-distribution for correct answers for Multiple Choice questions
Multiple-choice questions with more than one correct answer are valuable assessment tools. Also known as multiple-answer or multiple-select questions, these questions assess comprehensive understanding. They also promote deeper learning and higher-order thinking skills.
Some instructors wish to award partial credit for these question types. This practice awards students who have a partial understanding. It also fosters a positive learning experience.
In the past, instructors had to enter a value for partial credit percentage for each option. Now, Blackboard will auto-distribute partial credit across correct answer choices. This distribution provides efficiency and saves instructors’ time. If desired, instructors can edit the values if some correct answer options warrant more or less credit. Values for correct answers must sum to 100%.
Image below: Question credit auto-distributes across correct answer options; values can be edited.
2. Send reminder from gradebook list and grid views
Instructors may want to send a reminder to students or groups who haven’t yet made a submission for an assessment. To make this easy, Blackboard have added a “Send Reminder” option to items in the Gradebook.
There are two views of the Gradebook that can be toggled between using the button. List view and grid view.
Image below: Use the list view and grid view button to toggle between views.
From the Gradebook list view, the option to send a reminder is in the overflow menu (three dots).
Image below: Send Reminder option from list view
Instructors may access the “Send Reminder” option in the grid view by selecting the gradebook column header.
Image below: Send Reminder option from grid view
3. Delegated grading distribution by group membership
Instructors sometimes distribute the grading workload for an assessment to multiple graders. This is a popular practice in larger classes. Instructors can assign graders to groups of students with the new delegated grading option. Each grader will only see the submissions made by students in the group(s) assigned to them.
Delegated Grading can be used with all available group types. This first release of Delegated Grading supports assignment submissions from individual students. Tests, group assessments, and anonymous submissions are not supported at this time. These will be released at a later date.
After selecting the Delegated Grading option, select the appropriate Group Set. Instructors can assign one or more graders to each group in the group set. If multiple graders are assigned to the same group, they will share the grading responsibility for the group members.
Graders assigned to a group of students will only see submissions for those students on the assignment’s submission page. They can only post grades for their assigned group members. Any unassigned instructors enrolled in the course will see all student submissions on the assignment’s submission page. They also post grades for all students.
Note: At least one Group Set complete with Groups must be present in the course before using the Delegated Grading option.
Image below: Instructor view of the assessment Settings panel with the Delegated Grading option enabled.
4. Sorting for manually added gradable items.
Sorting controls help instructors organize and find information in the gradebook. Instructors can now use sorting controls on the grades page for manually created items. The sorting controls enable sorting in both ascending and descending order. Instructors can sort the following information:
Student name
Grade
Feedback
Post status
The applied sorting order is temporary and resets when you leave the page.
Note: Sorting controls can be applied to one column at a time. When you sort another column, items will order according to the selected column.
Image below: Instructor view of sorting controls on the grades page for a manually added gradable item
On 4 April Turnitin will be launching their new AI writing and ChatGPT detection capability which will be added to the Similarity Report. Before colleagues start using the AI detector, we thought that we would caveat it with the following quotations from authoritative professional bodies in the sector.
Jisc notes: “AI detectors cannot prove conclusively that text was written by AI.”
The QAA advises: “Be cautious in your use of tools that claim to detect text generated by AI and advise staff of the institutional position. The output from these tools is unverified and there is evidence that some text generated by AI evades detection. In addition, students may not have given permission to upload their work to these tools or agreed how their data will be stored.”
Please also see theGuidance for Staffcompiled by the Generative AI Working Group led by Mary Jacob. The guide outlines suggestions for how we can explain our existing assessments to students in ways that will discourage unacceptable academic practice with AI, and also red flags to consider when marking.
Turnitin also published an AI writing resource page to support educators with teaching resources and to report its progress in developing AI writing detection features.
If you have any questions about using Turnitin’s AI writing and ChatGPT detection capability or interpreting the results, please contact the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit (elearning@aber.ac.uk).
On 20 May, the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit were joined by Dr Mary Davies, Stephen Bunbury, Anna Krajewska, and Dr Matthew Jones for their online workshop: Contract Cheating Detection for Markers (Red Flags).
With other colleagues, they form the London South East Academic Integrity Network Contract Cheating Working Group and have been doing essential work and research into the increased use of essay mills and contract cheating.
The session included lots of practical tips for colleagues to help detect the use of Contract Cheating whilst marking.
The resources from the session are available below:
Further information on Unfair Academic Practice is available in the Academic Quality Handbook(see section 10).
Many thanks to the presenters. We’ve had such great external speaker sessions this academic year; take a look at our External Speakers blogposts for further information.
The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit is pleased to announce its next External Speaker Event.
On 20 May 2022 12:30-13:30, Dr Mary Davies, Principal Lecturer in the Business School at Oxford Brookes University, and colleagues will be running a workshop on their interactive red flag checklist resource Contract Cheating Detection for Markers.
Dr Davies will be joined by Stephen Bunbury, Senior Lecturer in Law at the University of Westminster, Anna Krajewska, Director of the Centre for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at Bloomsbury Institute, and Dr Matthew Jones, Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Greenwich.
This workshop is designed to help staff participants detect potential contract cheating when marking. The presenters belong to the London and South East Academic Integrity Network Contract Cheating Working Group who put together an interactive ‘red flag’ checklist resource Contract Cheating Detection for Markers.
In the workshop, the presenters will explain the red flags that indicate possible contract cheating, through discussing sections of the checklist: text analysis, referencing and the use of sources, Turnitin similarity and text matching, document properties, the writing process, comparison with students’ previous work, and comparison to cohort. Participants will be provided with opportunities to practise using the checklist and to discuss effective ways to help them identify potential contract cheating in student work.
Resources from previous External Speaker events can be found on our blog.
The workshop will take place online using Microsoft Teams. Book your place online.
Please contact the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit if you have any questions (lteu@aber.ac.uk).
The aim of the updated policy was to bring it in line with our Lecture Capture Policy and provide greater clarity over its scope and requirements from staff and students.
One big change that will affect the creation of Turnitin submission points is the introduction of a policy that gives student the option to submit multiple times before the deadline and also to view their Turnitin originality report. In the creation of the Turnitin submission point, choose the following settings:
Generate Similarity Reports for Students – Immediately (can overwrite until Due Date)
Allow Students to See Similarity Reports – Yes
The updated policy outlines:
The scope of E-submission and E-feedback
How our E-submission technologies makes use of yours and your students’ data
Tips for the submission of electronic work, including deadlines, giving students the opportunity to practice submitting
Grading and feedback expectations
Electronic submission for dissertations
Retention periods
Copyright
How IT failures are handled
Accessibility guidance for staff and students
The support available
Our E-submission page outlines all the support and training available for staff on e-submission. If you’ve got any questions about how to use these tools or drop us an email for assistance (elearning@aber.ac.uk).
Assessment Criteria serve a number of functions: to render the marking process transparent; to provide clarity about what is being assessed how; to ensure fairness across all submissions; and to provide quality assurance in terms of the subject benchmark statements. While all these reasons are valid and honourable, there are a number of issues at play:
Staff have greater or lesser control of the assessment criteria they are asked to use in marking student work and interpretations of criteria may vary between different staff marking the same assessment.
Assessment criteria are different from standards and the difference between the two must be clearly communicated to students (ie. what is being assessed versus how well a criterion has been met).
Students are often assessment motivated (cf. Worth, 2014) and overemphasis of criteria or overly detailed assessment criteria can lead to a box ticking-type approach.
Conversely, criteria that are too vague or too reliant on tacit subject knowledge can be mystifying and inaccessible to students, especially at the beginning of their degree.
This blog post will not pretend to solve all the issues surrounding assessment criteria but will offer a number of potential strategies staff and departments more widely may employ to demystify assessment criteria, and marking processes, for students. Thus, students become involved in a community of practice, rather than being treated as consumers (cf. Worth, 2014; Molesworth, Scullion & Nixon, 2011). Such activities can roughly be grouped chronologically in terms of happening before, during, or after an assessment.
Before
Use assessment criteria to identify goals and outcomes at the beginning of a module, with check-in points in the run up to a deadline.
Identify the difficulty in understanding marking criteria. Students are often used to very narrow definitions of success with clear statements that “earn” them points. Combined with a prevalent fear of failure, this can undermine their understanding of the criteria. Additionally, they may feel that they cannot judge their own abilities well in this new context (university). Group discussions not of what criteria mean, but what students understand them to mean, can help identify jargon that requires clarification, allow staff to explain their personal understanding (if they are the marker) and allow students to seek clarification before embarking on an assessment.
Highlight the difference between criteria and standards to students (the what and the how well – and how this is distinguished in your discipline).
Allocating time to a peer marking exercise using the provided criteria with subsequent group discussion will help students better understand the process.
Encouraging students to self mark their work pre-submission using the provided criteria will also help them better understand the process.
Using exemplars to illustrate both criteria and standards with concrete examples can be very helpful. This might involve students marking an exemplar in session, with subsequent discussion; annotated exemplars where students gain insights into the marking process; or live feedback sessions where students submit extracts of their work-in-progress that are used (anonymised) to show the whole group the marking process. This then allows for questions and clarification on the judgements a marker makes when working through a submission. Staff may worry that students consider exemplars as “the only right way” to respond to an assessment brief – providing a range of exemplars, especially good ones, can counteract this tendency. Different types of exemplars can be used:
‘Real’ assignments may be best for their inherent complexity (so long as students whose work is used consent to this use and their work is properly anonymised).
Constructed exemplars may make assessment qualities more visible.
Constructed excerpts (rather than full-length pieces) may be more appropriate when students first learn to look for criteria and how they translate into work as well as allay staff concerns about plagiarism.
During
Use the same language: making the links between assessment criteria, subject standards, and university standards clear through using the same terminology in feedback as appears in assessment criteria and subject benchmark statements.
Where multiple markers engage with different groups of students on the same assessment, having exemplars to refer to can help ensure clear standards across larger cohorts.
After
Refer students back to the assessment criteria and preceding discussions thereof when they engage with feedback and marks.
Reiterate the difference between criteria and standards.
Simply providing students with access to assessment criteria is not enough. It is essential that staff identify and clarify the distinction between criteria and standards and demystify the language of assessment criteria by examining tacit subject knowledge staff possess by virtue of experience. Using exemplars and group discussion of these in concretising how criteria and standards translate into a submission will provide students with insights into the marking process that enables them to better understand what they are being asked to do. Lastly, staff should repeatedly encourage students to make use of the availability of assessment criteria while they work on their assessments, which should enable students to feel better prepared and more focussed in their responses.
References:
Molesworth, M., Scullion, R., and Nixon, E. (eds.) (2011) The Marketisation of Higher Education and the Student as Consumer, London: Routledge
Worth, N. (2014) ‘Student-focused Assessment Criteria: Thinking Through Best Practice’, Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 38:3, pp. 361-372; DOI: 10.1080/03098265.2014.919441
The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit is pleased to announce its first mini-festival. The aim of the mini-fest is to bring together training sessions and workshops offered by LTEU around a particular topic with an external speaker. For this first mini-fest, we’ll be looking specifically at assessment. The mini fest will run from Monday 17th May until Friday 21st May and will be taking place online via Teams. Please book on the sessions that you wish to attend on our online booking system.
We are going to be joined by Professors Sally Brown and Kay Sambell to talk about assessment design post covid on Monday 17th May for a 2-hour workshop at 10.30am. Their paper Writing Better Assignments in the post Covid19 Era has been widely discussed across the sector since last summer:
Improving assessment and feedback processes post-pandemic: authentic approaches to improve student learning and engagement.
This workshop is designed to build on lessons learned during the complex transitions academics made last year when face-to-face on-campus assessment became impossible. A whole range of approaches were used by academics globally not only to cope with the contingency but also to streamline assessment and more fully align it with learning.
We now have an important opportunity to change assessment and feedback practices for good by boosting the authenticity of our designs to ensure they are future-fit. Drawing on their work undertaken throughout 2020, https://sally-brown.net/kay-sambell-and-sally-brown-covid-19-assessment-collection/ the facilitators of this workshop Professor Kay Sambell and Professor Sally Brown will argue that we can’t ever go back to former ways of assessment and will propose practical, manageable approaches that fully integrate assessment and feedback with learning, leading to improved outcomes and longer-term learning for students.
Professor Kay Sambell is an Independent Consultant widely known internationally for her contributions to the Assessment for Learning (AfL) movement in higher education. A 2002 National Teaching Fellow (NTF) and Principal Fellow Higher Education Academy (PFHEA), she is President of the vibrant Assessment in Higher Education (AHE) conference series, ( https://ahenetwork.org/) and Visiting Professor of Assessment for Learning at the University of Sunderland and the University of Cumbria. Kay has held personal chairs in Learning and Teaching at Northumbria University, where she co-led one of the UK Centres for Excellence in Teaching and Learning which specialised in AfL, and, more recently, at Edinburgh Napier University.
Professor Sally Brown is an Independent Consultant in Learning, Teaching and Assessment and Emerita Professor at Leeds Beckett University where she was, until 2010, Pro-Vice-Chancellor. She is also Visiting Professor at Edge Hill University and formerly at the Universities of Plymouth, Robert Gordon, South Wales and Liverpool John Moores and at Australian universities James Cook Central Queensland and the Sunshine Coast. She is a PFHEA, a Staff and Educational Development Association (SEDA) Senior Fellow and an NTF. She is widely published on learning, teaching and particularly assessment and enjoys working with institutions and teams on improving the student learning experience.
On Wednesday 16th December, the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit will host their next Mini Conference.
We are delighted to announce that Dr Naomi Winstone from University of Surrey will be giving a presentation:
From Transmission to Transformation: Maximising Student Engagement with Feedback
Even the highest-quality feedback on students’ work will not have an impact on their development unless students actively engage with and implement the advice. The literature, alongside anecdotal reports of educators, often paint a negative picture of students’ willingness to read and enact feedback. My recent programme of research has focused on students’ cognitive, motivational, and emotional landscapes and how they influence the ways in which students receive, process, and implement feedback on their work. In this talk, I will argue that maximising students’ engagement with feedback is fundamentally an issue of design, where opportunities for students to develop the skills required for effective use of feedback, and opportunities to apply feedback, can transform the role of students in assessment. In particular, I will share a toolkit of resources that we developed in partnership with students to support the development of feedback ‘recipience skills’. Through this approach, I demonstrate how the responsibility for ensuring that feedback has high impact can, and should, be shared between educators and students.
