Tii News: April 2016

Monday, 26 April from 2:10pm – 3:52pm

Studentcentral and Turnitin were affected by authentication issues from 2:10pm – 2:57pm on Monday 26th. During this time, we received a report related to Turnitin that students were prevented by a technical issue from viewing their originality reports after successful submissions. This was reported at 3:32pm by the University of Sussex and was resolved and confirmed by Turnitin at 3:52pm.

Thursday, 28th April from 1:00am – 5:00am

Studentcentral and Turnitin (accessed through our studentcentral integration) were intermittently unavailable due to essential maintenance undertaken to improve studentcentral online tests. The maintenance was completed successfully.

A short report from the Turnitin User Group meeting on 22/04/16

Nick Feather attended the Turnitin user group meeting last Friday and Fiona MacNeill also attended a user interview with Turnitin on Monday 26th. Feedback related to both these meetings is recounted below for your reference. For reference the Feedback Studio is the new name given to the Turnitin Document Viewer; the place where student papers are annotated and the unratified marks are entered. If you are interested in trying out the new Feedback Studio during your next marking cycle, please contact Fiona MacNeill.

1. The new Turnitin Feedback Studio features multiple marker support
   This is good news in general as each QuickMark features the marker’s initials and when you hover the mouse over the QuickMark it shows a tooltip with the marker’s full name. However there have been concerns raised in relation to this as it is not always appropriate for the markers to be known to each other or the student being marked (depends upon the marking scenario and the context of the assignment). Fiona raised at her meeting, that although this would be a helpful function in many cases, we also need to be able to turn it off if it is not appropriate (e.g. in the case of blind double-marking).
   
2. PeerMark inclusion in the Turnitin Feedback Studio
   PeerMark is not included in the Feedback Studio at this time. Demand from the Tii userbase may determine whether this part of the eMarking toolset is developed further (please let Fiona or your assigned LTA know if you use PeerMark and have any concerns about this).
   
3. Responsive on any device
   The new Feedback Studio will be responsive on any device, which means that once we switch over students will be able to view their feedback on mobile devices. A student facing map is on their roadmap but no definitive date has been set. You can review the Tii roadmap from the top-right hand side of the document viewer (screenshot shown at this page: http://turnitin.com/en_us/resources/blog/424-product/2040-roadmap-and-release-notes)
4. Multiple files and assignments
   No support for this yet and it is not a planned feature at this time.
5. Comments list has been removed from Feedback Studio
   Fiona has been evaluating the new Feeback Studio and noticed that the comments list had been removed. Turnitin have said that there are no plans to reinstate this feature as it wasn’t frequently used, however this is counter to how the document viewer has been used at University of Brighton. Fiona suggested use case scenarios for the comments list to Turnitin on a call with their user experience designers to suggest that this tool was useful from both a student and staff perspective. This may not result in any change, but it was raised as a concern.
6. The file upload limit is 40Mb
   This has been the case for a while, but worth listing here.

Support requests

1. Turnitin has been doing a lot to improve their support team in the UK
2. Turnitin have created a self-service guides site, which is really helpful: http://guides.turnitin.com/ if you would like to get a head start on the new feedback studio those help materials can be found here: https://guides.turnitin.com/01_Manuals_and_Guides/Turnitin_Feedback_Studio_Success_Kit/Instructor_User_Guide
3. Fiona has requested that Turnitin introduce a status log page, for keeping track of the system status in the UK and any issues that have arisen.

Long-term enhancement requests

These are based on Nick’s user group report. We cannot promise when/if they will be available, but some good ideas were proposed.

• ‘Portfolio’ view for students providing them with an overview of all of their assignment information – Future plan
• Instructors cannot share the grading forms (Rubrics) for use by others – Plan is to introduce this into Feedback Studio
• Editing grading forms or deleting old ones without having to remove them from being attached to boxes that are closed – No plan for this at the moment, but suggested