Changes to Turnitin: Information for Staff

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).

Component Marks Transfer

Turnitin icon

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: 

  • Training Session on: 
    • 3 May 11:00-12:00

Book your place online.  

If you have any questions about the process, email elearning@aber.ac.uk.  

External Speaker: Feedback Engagement, Dr Robert Nash

Banner for Audio Feedback

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.

Session Description

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.

Speaker Biography

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).

New Functionality in Turnitin: Assignment Template

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:

Assignment Template.
Includes:
Upload template Create Custom template

There are requirements for your template:

  • Uploaded files must be less than 100 MB
  • Accepted file types for upload: Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, WordPerfect, PostScript, PDF, HTML, RTF, OpenOffice (ODT), Hangul (HWP), and plain text
  • Templates must have at least 20 words of text

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).

Component Marks Transfer

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:

  • Training Sessions on:
    • Monday 13th December, 11am-12pm
    • Wednesday 5th January, 1pm-2pm

Book your place online.

If you have any questions about this process, email elearning@aber.ac.uk.

Updates to E-submission and E-feedback Policy

Banner for Audio Feedback

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:

  • 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).

Mini-Fest: Assessment – 17th May – 21st May

Distance Learner Banner

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.   

Kay.sambell@cumbria.ac.uk

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. 

S.brown@leedsbeckett.ac.uk

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:

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Drop in sessions: E-learning tools

We would like to offer staff members at the University the opportunity to join us for our drop-in sessions on using e-learning tools (Blackboard, Panopto, Turnitin and MS Teams) for learning and teaching activities. These will offer an informal opportunity to speak with our Online Learning Specialists and to address any problems or queries you may have.

All drop-in sessions will be held via MS Teams and there is no need to book, just click on the links below. *Please note that sessions with an asterisk (*) will be bilingual sessions, and all sessions without an asterisk will run as English-medium sessions.  

These drop-in sessions will take place on:
19.01.2021 (10:00-11:00): Join Microsoft Teams Meeting*
21.01.2021 (14:00-15:00): Join Microsoft Teams Meeting
26.01.2021 (10:00-11:00): Join Microsoft Teams Meeting*
28.01.2021 (14:00-15:00): Join Microsoft Teams Meeting
02.02.2021 (10:00-11:00): Join Microsoft Teams Meeting*
04.02.2021 (14:00-15:00): Join Microsoft Teams Meeting

We hope that these sessions will provide you with an opportunity to clarify any questions about your teaching needs.

If you have any questions, please email lteu@aber.ac.uk.

Welsh-Medium Continued Professional Development – What’s on?

The Learning and Teaching Enhancement Unit offers several sessions for Continued Professional Development (CPD) covering a range of topics. We offer sessions in both English and Welsh and Welsh-medium sessions will appear in Welsh on the staff training website. Here is an overview of the Welsh-medium sessions that we are offering throughout the rest of the semester:

November 2020

16.11.20 (11:00-12:30): CDU: Datblygu eich arferion addysgu (D & A: Ar-lein)

17.11.20 (14:00-15:30): CDU: Defnyddio MS Teams, Offer yr Ystafell Ddysgu ac Addysgu syncronaidd (D & A: Ar-lein)

20.11.20 (14:00-15:00): Hanfodion E-ddysgu: Cyflwyniad i Turnitin (D & A: Ar-lein)

25.11.20 (11:00-12:00): Hanfodion E-ddysgu: Cyflwyniad i Panopto (D & A: Ar-lein)

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Flags and the Insight Panel in Turnitin Feedback Studio

Staff who have graded assignment submissions via Turnitin will be familiar with the Similarity Report the Feedback Studio. The Feedback Studio interface highlights matches with online sources.

Turnitin have updated the interface of the Feedback Studio to now highlight for review textual inconsistencies in submission. These highlights are termed Flags.

Flags pick up potential integrity issues such as:
•Replaced text characters which could be inserted to circumvent a similarity match.
•Hidden text such as quotation marks that could impact the percentage of quoted material and enable the passing off of such content as original.

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