Here are some of the useful advice, including some of the problems and ways around them.
As a bit of guidance regarding online marking, the standard specification of desktop PCs that are supplied through Infrastructure Services (IS) – at the time of this blog post – are up to the job of online marking. We recommended that you use dual screens, or use a large enough monitor so it can be split into 2 halves.
As part of ongoing work with the Psychology division, non standard specifications were put together for a more portable solution for online marking. e.g. a laptop, with a desktop docking solution (external keyboard and mouse and large or dual screen monitor), or a desktop PC with large screen. The basic standard spec includes one monitor. This is based on you keeping your old monitor to use as the second display. If required, you could add a second monitor when ordering equipment.
Have a look at the spreadsheet attached to this post. There are 4 sheets with different specifications, all of which have been ok’d by IS, but of course would depend on funding available at the time of procurement. All prices are subject to change, and you can obviously request other specifications from John Nicholson, the IS Procurement Manager.
… you can type directly onto a paper when marking in GradeMark? You can also strike through text!
Type directly onto the paper
Click on the Text button at the top right of the GradeMark document viewer, then click anywhere on the paper to type your comment.
Strike through text
Make sure you are in comment mode by selecting the speech bubble at the top right of the document viewer window. (next to the Text button in the image above).
Highlight the text you want to strike through and press Delete or Backspace on your keyboard.
The Learning Technology Team is always developing user guidance on the tools you use for your teaching and have recently added much needed guidance to the Help pages on NILE for assessment and grading. Have a look at the Help tab in the NILE guides section for updated and new guidance on Assessment in NILE (including SaGE).
We have also developed step by step workflows so you can be sure that you do not miss anything when you are marking electronically. Click on the link or image and choose the type of electronic marking you would like to use (submission using Turnitin or the Assignment Tool with or without grading) to go through the necessary steps and view the relevant help materials.
There is a new guide on the help tab of NILE that gives you an overview of the grading process in NILE.
The University uses the 25 point scale (you can find this in the staff and student handbooks). NILE, however, uses a 100 point scale that converts a corresponding number to a letter to maintain consistency across all tools (quizzes, Turnitin, Assignment Tool, Grade Centre).
This guide gives you details of the scale and how to set up the schema in your module site on NILE. It also gives you a handy table with the 25 point/letter/100 point scales so you can easily determine the value you need to enter when grading in NILE.
Some staff have found that they hit a limit when entering text into the general comments area when marking using GradeMark. Please be aware that there is a 5000 character limit on the information that can be applied in this area. Please note, however, that spaces and punctuation also count as a ‘character’. This works out at around the 750 word mark.
The rationale for this is that this section should provide general guidance on what the student has done well and where improvements need to be made. (Full commenting should be made throughout the main body of the document.)
Each comment made throughout the document (when you click within the page and enter text into the box) has a character limit of 1000, which works out at around 180 words.
This includes details of how to make Turnitin GradeMarked papers available to students on a specific date and making feedback visible using the Assignment Tool/Grade Centre.
Have a look at this guide to ensure your feedback will not be released until you are ready for it to be!
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.
The following bug has been brought to our attention today. Some files created in MS Word 2007, which have charts pasted in from Excel, cannot be reopened by other users because the chart corrupts the file. This results in the following error when you attempt to open the file:
According to Microsoft website this is a known issue with Office 2007. You can see more details about this on Microsoft’s support website.
This error has affected some tutors wanting to download student assignments that have been submitted through NILE. For files submitted to Turnitin, there is a workaround for this, which is to choose to download the submitted files in PDF format rather than the original (.docx) format. You may also be able to open the files using Word 2010 if you have access to this. Please note that this bug does not seem to affect those using the online grading tool (Grademark).
We would also recommend that any members of staff asking students to submit files containing charts should advise them to convert their file to PDF (e.g. using the Save As PDF option in Word) before submitting it.
If you encounter this error and would like advice, please contact the Learning Technology team.
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