Turnitin will be unavailable between 00:00 and 08:00 on Saturday 9 July 2022 for scheduled maintenance.
During this time, you will be unable to submit or grade any assessments.
We apologise for any inconvenience caused.
For the academic year 2022/23 we will be using a new version of Turnitin.
On Tuesday 5 July Information Services will be enabling the new Turnitin on Blackboard.
Whilst most of Turnitin’s current functionality will remain the same, there will be some changes.
To help students with this change, we have arranged the following FAQs:
Our webpages and help guidance will be updated to reflect these changes.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to 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.
For the academic year 2022/23 we will be using a new version of Turnitin.
On Tuesday 5 July 2022 Information Services will be enabling the new version of Turnitin on Blackboard.
Whilst most of Turnitin’s current functionality will remain the same, there will be some changes.
To help staff with this change, we have arranged the following FAQs:
Further information can be found in our Turnitin LTI FAQs.
Our webpages and help guidance will be updated to reflect these changes. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit (elearning@aber.ac.uk).
As May starts to approach, we thought it would be useful to outline the support available for the Component Marks Transfer process. This process transfers marks from the Blackboard Grade Centre columns into AStRA’s Assessment marks per Module (STF080) page.
The tool is available in each Blackboard module and also in the Component Marks tool in MyAdmin. Departmental Administrative Staff are able to view and transfer modules for each module in their department whereas Module Co-ordinators are able to view and transfer marks for their modules.
To support the Component Marks Transfer process, we have:
Book your place online.
If you have any questions about the process, email elearning@aber.ac.uk.
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).
On Friday 11 March, the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit hosted Dr Rob Nash, a Reader in Psychology from Aston University. Rob is an expert in feedback and ran a workshop looking explicitly at ways in which we can enhance and develop feedback engagement.
A recording of the transmission elements of the session is available on Panopto. You can also view the slides that he used.
For those of you who are interested in further exploring the terrain of feedback, you can take a look at the references that Rob used in his session:
Our next External Speaker event is Dr Mary Davies from Oxford Brookes who’ll be joined by other colleagues to discuss how we can detect potential contract cheating during the marking process. This workshop will be on 20 May 2022, 12:30-13:30. Booking for the session is already open.
A reminder as well that our Call for Proposals for our Annual Learning and Teaching Conference is currently open.
The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit is pleased to announce our next External Speaker.
On Friday 11 March, 10am-12pm, Robert Nash will be running a masterclass on strategies for feedback engagement.
Bookings for the event are open via the CPD Staff booking page.
The workshop will take place online via Teams. A link will be sent to you before the event.
Please see below for the session description and speaker biography.
Why don’t they listen to my feedback?
Most people prefer to perform well than to perform badly, and one of the primary aims of giving feedback to students is to help them improve their performance. So why do our students so often ignore, resist, and reject the feedback we give them, and what can we do about it? To set the scene for this workshop, we will first consider the extent to which these problems are unique to students. In particular, I will share some insights from diverse domains of social psychology that shed light on the very human motives behind avoiding feedback. With these insights in mind, we will go on to explore the perceived and actual barriers that limit students’ effective engagement with their feedback. We will contemplate practical ways by which we, as educators, might play a role in breaking down these barriers. Throughout these discussions, sustainability is key: with academic workloads spiralling ever higher, our fixes cannot involve us always giving more feedback, quicker feedback, and fancier feedback. I will share my own mixed experiences of trying to implement into my own teaching practice what I’ve learned from almost a decade of working on these problems.
Dr Rob Nash is a Reader in Psychology at Aston University, where he is currently Director of Undergraduate Learning & Teaching for the School of Psychology. A experimental psychologist, Rob’s primary expertise is in human memory, particularly the ways in which memories become biased, distorted, and fabricated. However, he also conducts and publishes research on the topic of feedback in education, with an emphasis on how people respond and react when given feedback. Rob is a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, Associate Editor of the peer-reviewed journal Legal & Criminological Psychology, and co-author of the Developing Engagement with Feedback Toolkit (Higher Education Academy, 2016).
If you’ve got any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact us (lteu@aber.ac.uk).
Turnitin, our e-submission software, has introduced some new functionality regarding assignment templates.
It’s now possible to exclude templates from showing up in the Similarity Score.
To apply the exclusion, go to the Optional Settings in the Turnitin submission point and upload your assignment template:
There are requirements for your template:
As well as uploading, you can also create a template from this interface too.
This functionality can only be applied to a submission point if there have been no submissions. Further information on using Turnitin can be found on our E-submission webpages or you’re welcome to email us (elearning@aber.ac.uk).
Welcome to new staff joining Aberystwyth University
We’re the Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit. Based in Information Services. We work with staff across the university to support and develop learning and teaching. We run a wide range of activities to do this.
All the information that you need is on theLearning and Teaching Enhancement Unit webpages. We have recently worked intensively with academic colleagues to develop solutions in response to the Covid 19 pandemic. Our Supporting your Teachingwebpages will help you with various teaching solutions.
We write a blog full of the latest updates, details on events and training sessions, and resources.
If you need to get in touch with us, you can do so using one of two email addresses:
lteu@aber.ac.uk (for pedagogical and design questions, or to arrange a consultation) or
elearning@aber.ac.uk (for technical queries regarding our e-learning tools listed below)