Posts by: Adel
Gill Gourlay – Senior lecturer in Marketing and Entrepreneurship has the challenge of marking around 350 level 4 papers with a marking team of 6 tutors. Marking criteria for this assignment already existed and Gill and the team used paper based rubrics to mark the work in previous years.
With varying benefits and challenges the team successfully marked and fed back to all students. Have a look at the case study for more details about the process: Using NILE (Blackboard) Rubrics to mark Turnitin assignments
Sally Laurie – Senior lecturer in Marketing and Entrepreneurship has been using innovative technology within NILE for a few years now. Over the last academic year Sally has started to use the Rubrics tool within NILE to evaluate her students’ work using existing marking criteria based on the UMF guidelines and learning outcomes for each module.
With support from Learning Technology, Sally has successfully used rubrics within a classroom, while students present, to mark and feedback on their work. Moderation also took place at the same time.
The case study describes all the details, benefits, challenges and key points: Using NILE (Blackboard) Rubrics to mark Presentations
The default My Sites box on your NILE homepage is an unhelpful, alphabetical mess. We attempted to alleviate a little bit of the ridiculousness by prefixing site titles with ’12/13′ last year so at least all your 12/13 sites will appear at the top of the box, but we have come up with a better solution! It’s called ‘Group by Term’ and you can enable it on your own NILE homepage by following these instructions.
Hover your mouse over the My Sites box and click on the cog icon at the top right:
In section 1 of that screen, tick the box next to ‘Group by Term‘:
So far, we have two Terms set up on NILE, one for the 12/13 academic year, and one for 13/14. You can specify which one(s) you would like to be displayed in your My Sites box (Show Term), and also whether you would like see the Term, by default, in its expanded or collapsed state (Expand Term) – click on the image to zoom in.
Choose whichever options you require, click Submit and you will see a better organised My Sites box:
The LearnTech team have added a widget in the top right corner of the NILE screen to display the current time and date in the UK. This is to help overseas students to determine the correct deadlines to work to for online submission.
We have also added a box on the login page to notify users that the NILE and Turnitin services are (or are not) working normally. We will change the image to a red cross if there are any problems with either of the systems. At all other times a green tick will be displayed.
Released this week!
The new ‘My Library Account’ box embeds live library account information onto your NILE homepage. This information is updated in real time and will let you know what books you have borrowed, if you have any reservations waiting for collection and if you currently owe any fines. It will also let you link directly to your full Library account so that you can complete any further online transactions. We hope that this integration will help users keep up-to-date with their library borrowing and avoid any unnecessary fines or account problems.
Check it out next time you log into NILE.
A number of queries have been raised with the Learning Technologists about Grade Centre (GC) columns reverting to display a numeric value rather than UG/PG letter. This typically happens when a tutor changes the settings for the Turnitin (Tii) assignment after adjusting the Primary Display setting in the GC to display a letter instead of the numerical score. Turnitin have indicated that this is because of the way that Tii integrates with Blackboard (NILE) and as such the system is working properly. Tii have suggested that we submit a product enhancement request asking that if the GC primary display is changed to a letter then any subsequent changes to the Tii settings would not be overridden, which we have done. In the meantime …
- When setting up your Tii submission points, please think very carefully about what date you select for a post date. The University permits 4 working weeks from the submission date to the date when the feedback and grades should be released to students and we therefore recommend you choose your postdate accordingly.
- If you do have to change the post date for any reason, please remember that you will need to check your GC column settings and ensure that the column displays the appropriate letter rather than the numerical score.
- Don’t forget to ensure that the GC column is hidden from students until the post date (open the column menu in the GC, click Show/Hide to Users. Ensure the symbol indicating the column is hidden from students appears in the column header).
If you have any questions about this then please get in touch with the team.
This case study talks about a pilot run by Janet Jackson and her students in Environmental Sciences from the School of Science & Technology, whilst on 2 field trips to Wicken Fen and Stonehenge.
The main aims of this pilot were to allow the students to document and reflect on their findings whilst in the context (in this case the field trips), and then to access and re-use that information outside of the context.
Students enjoyed using the devices, particularly for photography and video, which helped them to record a lot of data very easily. 80% of the students said that the app was ‘easy’ or ‘very easy’ to use.
Learning across contexts – mobile for fieldwork (case study, PDF 638KB)
This case study reports findings from a pilot run in stage 2 of Foundation Art and Design (Nov 2011-Feb 2012) by Jayne Corfield in the School of Arts.
Online spaces in NILE, which are easily accessible using mobile technology, were set up for students to document and reflect on their work anytime, anywhere, across any context.
Learner generated contexts – mobile for anytime anywhere learning (case study, PDF 511KB)
We have recently discovered that some assistive technologies do not work well with Turnitin. Screen readers like JAWS work when non-standard settings are selected, but are hard to follow and navigate.
So, if you anticipate asking a student with additional needs to submit their work online, please contact the team for advice, at least two weeks before the first submission is due.
