During the summer of 2020 the University of Sussex Business School worked with a team of student connectors to co-create a series of new marking criteria for each level of study. The project sought to ensure quality and provide consistency, using wording that was accessible to students. You can read more about the project in our past post – Co-created marking criteria.
Read more ›4 Great tools for collaboration
Collaboration is an essential part of learning so, this blog post will explore four tools you can use at the University of Sussex to facilitate digital collaboration.
Read more ›What is your problem? Apps that can help problem-based learning exercises
Interested to know more about the practices and theories behind problem-based learning (often shortened to its acronym PBL), the Active Learning Network set up a problem-based learning exploration hour last month which was attended by a number of educationalists across the UK. The idea was simply to pass forty-five minutes together and discuss PBL theory and how it could be applied in our individual contexts and disciplines.
Read more ›Canvas, Panopto and Padlet: what’s new?
The learning technologies that we use at the University of Sussex see a steady stream of updates as they respond to the needs of their users. We thought it would be useful to pull together all of the recent updates across the key learning technologies in use at Sussex in order to provide you with a summary of newly added features.
Read more ›Multimedia enhanced teaching and learning: an update
Looking back on the last few years of the TEL blog, the topic of multimedia enhanced teaching and learning was amongst the top posts for viewer engagement, and we thought this topic deserved a refresh.
Read more ›Quizzes and polls in class and online
Polls and quizzes can be great for increasing the interactivity of teaching sessions and encouraging student engagement. You might want to use a poll to kick off a discussion or a quiz to check students’ understanding of previous content before moving on. A quiz after a lecture can also be a great way for students to check their own learning and a poll could help identify topics for revision.
Read more ›Rubrics and you
Providing responsive and consistent feedback to students is an important if challenging part of assessment, however there are techniques and tools that can help you as a marker to leave great feedback. One of those techniques, and the focus of this blog post, is using rubrics.
What is a Rubic you may well be asking? The word rubric can have different meanings within a variety of contexts which can lead to some confusion. Within an educational context a rubric is defined as a consistent and coherent set of criteria for students’ work that includes descriptions of levels of performance quality achieved against marking criteria.
Marking criteria are essentially your standards of judgement for the assignment you have set. Your School will have a set of marking criteria for each assessment type. Such generic assessment criteria can be tailored to the individual assessments within your modules.
Marking or scoring rubrics, (also called ‘grading forms’) are a guide to marking against such generic standards of judgement. As such, rubrics set out how generic marking criteria have been tailored for, and should be applied to, a specific assessment task. Often constructed as a table or grid, rubrics map the agreed criteria against quality or grade descriptors.
Good rubrics also include explicit definitions of the quality expected for the different levels of judgement. Rubrics can incorporate precise scores for each criterion and level of achievement, or be used as a guide for assigning qualitative marks.
Rubrics allow teachers to structure their own observations of a student’s work against the description in the rubric. As feedback is supplied individually for each criteria it can then help a student to identify their work’s strengths and weaknesses and work out which areas of their work require improvement.
This also allows for cohesiveness in the feedback a student achieves, if they can compare feedback across different pieces of work that have all used the same rubric for their assessment then it creates a clearer path to improving their learning. Rubrics have also been found to reduce students’ anxiety and so support performance. Students report increased confidence and greater transparency into the marking process as they have a better idea of what is expected of their work and how it can relate to their grades.
So there are some researched benefits into using rubrics, but how can you go about using them in your assessments? Any submission using the standard e-submission workflows of Turnitn or Canvas Online (please note that assessments done have tools which allow you to attach rubrics to your assessments. Rubrics can be used for all sorts of assessments both summative and formative in a variety of contexts.
Turnitin
The way that Turnitin Feedback Studio allows you to create and mark with Rubrics is through the use of a grid-based form containing criteria (on the vertical axis), scales (on the horizontal axis) and descriptors (on the grid) where you can add predefined feedback comments.
Tutors can use this tool to provide feedback on a student’s individual piece of work by selecting the relevant boxes on the grid which indicate the performance level on the scale in relation to each of the criteria.
- Criteria defines the characteristic or property by which the work is being assessed.
- Scale defines levels of performance reached for each criteria. Typically based on a grade boundary or other performance indicator.
- Descriptor defines descriptive details of the standards and expectations to achieve each level of the scale within the context of the criteria
A single rubric can be created in order to provide consistency for marking all submissions, however each custom Rubric form can be reused, adapted and shared for use in other assessments. When students view their feedback inside Turnitin Feedback Studio they’ll be able to view this rubric and will be presented with the descriptor based on the scale they have reached for each specific criteria.
Canvas Online
Canvas Online allows you to create rubrics by defining criteria and ratings taking the form of mark values or mark ranges for each criteria. It’s also possible to define a set amount of points it’s possible to achieve in each criteria and you have the option of using these points to make up the students overall grade for the assessment. Points can however be disabled within the rubric itself. You also have the option to not use defined marks but to write freeform comments as feedback for each criteria.
Students will be able to view the rubric and the rating they have achieved (or freeform comments in the absence of a rating) when viewing their feedback within Canvas.
Further guidance and resources
TEL have created a Rubrics guidance page on our Teaching Online, Learning Anywhere site which hosts a variety of good practise, examples and guidance on using rubrics within your assessments. These Canvas Guides may also be helpful:
- How do I add a Rubric to a Canvas Online assignment?
- How do I use a rubric to grade a submission within Canvas Online?
- Creating and attaching Turnitin Rubrics Guidance
If you’d like any help in designing or applying rubrics then please get in touch with TEL at TEL@sussex.ac.uk
Tagged with: assessment, Canvas, feedback, Feedback Studio, Rubrics, Turnitin
Posted in feedback, Marking and assessment
Posted in feedback, Marking and assessment
Digital whiteboards for collaboration
When learning together, a digital space to capture and/or organise ideas can be useful. Whether in-person or remote, synchronous or asynchronous, activities using digital whiteboards can help students to build on each other’s learning. This post will look at a few types of activities and some tools that could be used for them.
Whiteboard activities
Before we consider some of the digital tools available it is worth thinking about what your collaborative activity is intended to achieve and the context in which it is happening. Here are some examples of ways that digital whiteboards might be used in a learning environment:
- Collect responses to discussion questions either individually, or from small groups.
- Collect ideas and responses prior to organising them (brainstorm / thought shower).
- Build conceptual maps.
- Annotate images (diagrams, charts etc.).
Most of these could occur in either in-person classes or remote sessions and may be synchronous or asynchronous.
Tools
Depending on your activity there are a few tools that will suit you. This grid will help you choose which tool(s) to try. We have indicated whether there is an institutional licence, which tools are useful for remote, in-person, synchronous and asynchronous activities and provided a link to information about accessibility.
| University licence | Remote and in-person? | Synchronous and asynchronous? | Accessibility | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Zoom whiteboard | Yes as part of Zoom | No, available during Zoom meeting only. | No, available during Zoom meeting only. | Zoom accessibility |
| Padlet | Yes, for staff | Yes | Yes | Accessibility and Padlet |
| Microsoft Whiteboard | Yes as part of Office 365 | Yes | Yes | Microsoft accessibility |
| Miro | No but free options | Yes | Yes | Miro accessibility |
| Mural | No but free options | Yes | Yes | Mural accessibility statement |
Zoom whiteboard is the simple choice if you are in a Zoom meeting. It has some useful functionality and avoids the need for participants to open any other tools. You can read more about using whiteboards in Sharing a whiteboard from the Zoom support pages.
If you want something that can be used in a live session but also before and/or after the class then Padlet or Microsoft Whiteboard would be good choices depending on the activity. We have written several blog posts about Padlet which should give you an idea of the possibilities:
- 4 fantastic uses for Padlet in online teaching
- Padlet maps and timelines
- Adding a ‘chat’ backchannel to in-person classes
Microsoft Whiteboard is probably less familiar, but as part of the Office 365 suite of apps it is available to all staff and students at Sussex.
Miro and Mural are similar to each other and have more options than any of the whiteboards we have looked at so far. Neither is licensed by the university, but there is a lot that can be done with the free versions and Miro also has an educational licence. Both offer a range of templates so you don’t have to start from a blank board and finished boards can be embedded in Canvas. Members of TEL have tried these and like some of the features such as Miro’s ‘Follow’, ‘Bring to me’ and ‘Bring everyone to me’ as well as the timers, chat and presentation options.
If you think you might like to try one of them, this detailed comparison of the two apps might help you decide which one will suit your purposes.
Considerations and further guidance
As always, it is important to consider accessibility when using digital tools. If using one of these in teaching you should check whether there are any accessibility issues and make alternative arrangements when necessary. There is more guidance on accessibility in our Digital Accessibility Toolkit.
If you are planning to use digital tools in an on-campus session it will be important to advise students to bring their mobile devices and to check that the tool you want to use will work well with most devices. If necessary pairs or small groups could collaborate via a single device (Covid restrictions allowing).
University of Sussex teaching staff can contact a learning technologist via tel@sussex.ac.uk to discuss whiteboard options.
This work by Educational Enhancement, University of Sussex is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at https://blogs.sussex.ac.uk/tel/.