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CELT Newsletters

Assessment, Brightspace and Events

18 October 2019
Assessment and Brightspace
Draft Submissions

Students are able to submit draft assessments to TurnItIn before submitting final versions. The number of times a draft submission can be made will reduce as the student progresses through their course, and increases confidence and capability in academic writing and integrity.

  • at Level 3 (Foundation), Level 4 and Level 5 a student will be able to make unlimited draft submissions.
  • at Level 6 and Level 7, a student will be able to only make one draft submission.

The ability to submit drafts is created by your Course Administrator (Partner College colleagues should speak with their HE Office) as part of the creation of submission points in Brightspace.  These draft submissions are to allow students to use Tii as a developmental tool, there is no requirement for academics to read or feedback on these submissions.

Brightspace

Over the next couple of weeks, you will notice some quite significant but powerful updates to Brightspace. These take the form of a new annotations tool and a significant amount of small graphical changes which should make life easier for everyone editing and administering Brightspace on a daily basis.

Annotations Tool

Brightspace have now released their new built-in annotations tool, the tool was initially trialled with a small group of course teams.  The tool has some incredible features and some additional ones that Turnitin wasn’t capable of.

We have now turned this on for all module areas and the tool can be accessed by clicking on the student’s uploaded assignment instead of clicking on the Turnitin area icons.  For academic year 2019 – 2020 we ask course teams to start to investigate their use of the new Brightspace tool, with a plan to standardise all annotations through this tool from 2020 - 2021.  Turnitin is still the tool to use to access Similarity reports.  Below is a screenshot showing the annotation tool in use.

You can see how to use the new annotations tool in your ‘Brightspace Introduction CPD Course’ - Brightspace Basics - Annotations

Visual Changes

As you become more familiar with the tools throughout Brightspace, there is always a common option of being able to hide the tool from the student, whether that’s content, an assignment, a quiz, etc. However, up until now they have all used very different terminology.

Below you can see the new changes to these areas to unify all of these options into one ‘Hide from users’ option.

·             The language used to denote that an activity is not visible to a learner will become a single term: Hidden.

·             Similarly, the visibility icon () for a hidden activity will appear consistently.  

·             The different visibility form controls will be replaced by a simple checkbox.

·             The visibility form controls will appear consistently on the Restrictions tab.

There are other reasons for these changes:

·             To reduce the time and effort to teach, learn, and document workflows in Brightspace.

·             To work toward better consistency in the behaviour of activity visibility, which will help user’s confidence in the system.

To see what these changes look like across other key tools, view the blog post here:https://libguides.uos.ac.uk/blog/Brightspace-October-Updates

Learning and Teaching Day

A gentle reminder that the first of our Learning and Teaching events in 2019-2020 will be held on 18 December, 12.30 – 16.30. Colleagues are now able to book their place. This event will introduce our institutional Access and Participation Plan and the Theory of Change which underpins the work we will undertake to achieve our commitments and targets.   

Future Updates:

  • Module Homepage changes
  • Student Progress Visualisations
  • Brightspace Grade and Assessment tools

In this update: