Efficiencies in Assessments through Technology

Over the past year at MMU, I have promoted various technologies and tools to help encourage staff to get more involved with eLearning. I'm now working on a couple of posts to provide short (ish) Case Studies to exemplify real word activities and what might be achieved with technological implementations.

This first case study is about a project I led in a previous role, and have supported (to some extent) here at MMU, related to redesigning everyday business processes to manage the assessment life cycle more efficiently.

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What was the Problem?

For quite some time, students have been making their views known about the efficiency (or lack thereof) of the assessment -- feedback cycle; in short, students want feedback quicker, and in a form that they can understand (opposed to unreadable hand-written feedback).

Licensed under CC-NC-ND from Flickr User UBC Library

Secondly, the economic and environmental impact, and the costs associated to printing hundreds and thousands of essays were (and are) significant. Removing this can only be seen as positive!

Strategy?

Well, a strategic decision was made by the Dean (of a Faculty in a previous role elsewhere) and other senior colleagues. The decision was that all assessments (that were suitable - mainly essays) should be managed through TurnItIn, including the submission, marking and feedback processes.
(I think if the truth be told, this strategic decision hadn't considered what would be required to actually get this working, but that's where I came in).

What did we do?

It was essential that a working group was formed to scope out and oversee the project - this multi-professional group involved academic staff, learning technology experts/managers, senior administrative staff, and academic managers (including Associate Dean for Teaching and Learning).

After initial discussions amongst the group, I worked with the Programme Team Leader and senior academic colleagues to scope out and timeline existing processes, including hand-in dates, how submissions were handled and recorded, passed to markers, moderators, etc. From this we could then identify where technology and new processes were required.

So what were the new processes?

• All students were informed of the new processes at the beginning of the semester
• Students were encouraged to submit a draft (but preferably a formative) piece of work to TurnItIn at least two weeks before the coursework due date. This was largely to overcome any technical barriers that inevitably occur when students submit 5 minutes before the deadline.
• Programme team would monitor submissions within the VLE before, at, and after the deadline, and inform markers of papers to mark (this often included a number of academic staff to split large groups of students - 200+).
• Markers would view papers in TurnItIn and use Grademark facilities to leave in-text and general comments on papers, as well as a grade.
• Programme team would download the Gradebook and inform second markers/moderators to log in and mark/moderate.
• Programme team could mass download papers for archiving, as well as download marks into Excel to be reformatted and uploaded to the student record system.
• Students could retrieve marks and electronic feedback from within TurnItIn

What were the benefits of the new processes?

• Students were no longer required to travel to campus from across the country to submit coursework
• Easier/Quicker for staff to leave common comments on student work through developing a QuickMark set, which could be drag & dropped onto student work
• Electronic feedback and grades much easier to understand
• Manual handling times reduced due to electronic procedures
• Staff didn't need to carry a small suitcase to take scripts home with them - it's all in the cloud!
• Printing completely removed - massive economic and environmental benefits - a sample of 6 first-year units saved over 7500 sheets of paper, or 15 reams of paper!

What support was provided?

• Specific training sessions for academic and administrative staff, including guides and screencasts
• Guides and Screencasts for students 
• Faculty guidelines for the use of Turnitin and Grademark
• Assignment template for students, including front cover and pre-formatted pages

What challenges did we face?

• A major challenge was training all Faculty staff in the workings of TurnItIn and Grademark, and informing them of the new policies. 
• Technically, we only came across one problem - we found that at various times, Grademark facilities became really slow - so much so that it seriously hindered the ability to mark and leave feedback. Using Firefox seemed to help this a great deal though.

Where next?

Turnitin & Grademark have an interesting feature called Rubrics, which could further enhance online marking. Furthermore, the developments in relation to tablet computing could lead to some interesting pilot projects - word has it TurnItIn will be releasing a dedicated iPad app next year!

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Have you used any of these tools in your teaching/learning?

Are you using technology effectively in your teaching and want to feature on a case study here?

This case study has used the JISC Case Study template as a basis.

Please use the comments section to get involved in discussion. 

This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License, however image work might contain alternative licenses.

Turnitin & Grademark

Ahead of the Turnitin Workshop this week, this post hopes to give a quick overview of some of the key features that are offered using Turnitin and it's lesser known companion, Grademark.

As most people will know, Turnitin has been the leading UK plagiarism detection service for a number of years. It can provide a great development opportunity and really help students develop their academic writing skills by enabling originality reports for draft assignments.

For me, the biggest strength of the service lies in the paperless marking capabilities offered through Grademark. In short, managing online submissions through Turnitin allows academic staff to take advantage of the built-in marking features, including QuickMark comments; a feature allowing markers to build a database of comments they commonly leave on student papers. They can then drag and drop these quickmarks onto the paper, potentially saving bags of time from retyping the same things! Also, as you build up your personal QuickMark comments, you can export and re-import them into other units.

Furthermore, this completely online process of submission, marking and feedback impacts upon two huge areas of current interest;

• Student Feedback, which suggests students want the freedom to submit work online to avoid the time and financial costs of printing and travelling to campus to submit work, as well as receiving more timely feedback that is in a legible format (compared with handwritten feedback).
• The University's Green Impact Campaign, an innovative program that inspires staff and students to collectively 'green' MMU.
  SUSTEIT suggests the major environmental impacts are related to paper, and that reducing paper consumption is “perhaps the most important feature of a sustainable printing strategy” (James & Hopkinson, 2009). Previous work that I have been involved in with Turnitin & Grademark has saved significant amounts of paper - online submission across just six first-year units saved around 7500 sheets, totalling 15 reams of paper. Imagine if this was scaled larger!

So, come along on Thursday (12-1pm. C1:01) to learn more and get some practical experience in using some of the tools offered by Turnitin & Grademark. If you can't make it, there are some materials available within the Staff Resource Area's 'Moodle Training Guides' page.



This work by Peter Reed is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. N.B all images in this post are taken from www.turnitin.com and may be restricted by further copyright licenses.