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 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).
As December 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 this process, email elearning@aber.ac.uk.
The updated E-submission Policy has been approved by Academic Enhancement Committee. You can read the updated policy on our E-submission Pages.
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:
The updated policy outlines:
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).
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.
Website: https://kaysambell.wordpress.com
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.
Website: https://sally-brown.net
In addition to Sally’s and Kay’s workshop, LTEU will be offering sessions and workshops over the course of the week: