One of the fantastic (albeit slightly unnerving) aspects of using Grademark to do my marking is that when new features are added, they simply ‘appear’ in the inbox of the document viewer, ready for me to use. I’m lucky in that I get alerts to some of these changes, but sometimes they feel like they’ve turned up unannounced. This is a great thing in that you always get the new features as soon as they are available without having to wait for an upgrade. But it can be, as I said, unnerving: especially if you are in the middle of conducting some training and there is a new feature there that you’ve not encountered before!

In the last few months a fair few new features have appeared and having just undertaken two rather significant blocks of marking, I thought it was worth reflecting on my experiences and uses of them. These are considered in no particular order.

Response column: This is a new feature in the assignment inbox which shows if and when students have collected their feedback (image right). Of course it can’t tell us if they’ve engaged with their feedback, understood it and/or addressed it, but at least we now know if it’s been collected. I’ve been amazed at how quickly students have accessed their mark and feedback. For instance, a bunch of assignments were released at 1pm today and by 1.05pm, eight students had collected their feedback. Given I’d only sent the email alerting them to the release time having been moved forward 15 minutes earlier, I was pretty amazed by this! I checked an hour or so later and the number was up to 27 students: roughly a third of the total.

Rubric viewer: In the move to Turnitin 2, one of the things that a lot of people missed was the ability to see the rubric clearly. The new version of the rubric required you to mouse over each segment in order to see the words. A recent adjustment means that with the click of a single button (the four-arrow button in the image to the left) the whole rubric can be opened out into a full view and can be moved to a second screen. I tend to use two monitors (I dock my laptop to a screen whenever I can) so I’ve now got into the habit of opening the rubric straight away and moving it onto my second screen. This means I can adjust it as I go rather than having to remember everything at the end of the paper. It also means that you can put a lot more detail into the rubric segments and still see it all clearly which is a vast improvement on the old view of the rubric.

Strike through: when you highlight text in the document viewer and click the ‘delete’ or ‘backspace’ key a red strike-through line appears. This is really handy for correcting spelling errors (I type the correct spelling above the word using Text Comment, but it’s also really useful to show students how they can simplify their language by eliminating unnecessary words or turns of phrase. I’ve done this several times with sentences or whole paragraphs and left a comment next to it saying to students that I have ‘deleted’ words to show how many unnecessary words they are using.

These three new features are pretty simple but I’ve been amazed at how quickly and easily I’ve been able to incorporate them into my marking practice.

Tabitha from Turnitin has just sent through the link to a really helpful, interactive guide to the key features of Grademark. This is going to be really handy to ping to people. It’s just covering the basics (no detail on how to use the rubric for instance) but it’s just what anyone needs to get going with the tool.

Me and my two team-teaching colleagues are just putting the finishing touches on a pile of marking for our second year students. When I say ‘pile’ it is of course a virtual pile as we’ve done all of the marking and moderation on Grademark. Prior to the submission of this assessment task, I put together a screencast which offered the students pre-submission feedback. I used data generated by the marking we did last year on this same task and used it as a guide to offer students support and feedback based on the problems students encountered last year. I’m going to evaluate the effectiveness on this batch of students’ work in the coming weeks. I’ll also be putting my ‘infographics’ skills to the test as I build some graphs based on this years’ marking, ready for a workshop with the whole student cohort this Thursday. They get their individual feedback on the Wednesday and then the workshop, going through the data for the whole cohort is the following day. This is an opportunity for me to show them where the common problems were, where most students gained or lost marks and what they need to concentrate on for their next piece of work in the module and for other pieces they’ll need to submit in other modules. The following workshop (held a fortnight later) has no set topic. During this first workshop I’ll let the students decide what it is they want more help with and we’ll use that workshop to focus on these issues.

I’m hoping this will achieve two things:

1. encourage the students to engage with their feedback and act on it;
2. improve students’ results in subsequent assessment, thereby making the labour we put into the marking more valuable and useful.

I’ll be evaluating the impact on this as part of the EBEAM project in the weeks and months to come.

Cheryl and I are heading up to Beverly tomorrow to attend the Regional Support Centre  Yorkshire HE conference: Practical Learning in a Digital World. Cheryl will be presenting the keynote at the end of the day and I will be running a workshop on the EBEAM project, focusing particularly on analytics. A link to the presentation for my workshop can be found below.

[prezi id=’http://prezi.com/cmwv-mwb9ueu/rsc-yorkshire/’ width=’500′]