Media Cloud forecast: in-video quizzes and more

Recently the Bloomsbury Media Cloud User Group attended a presentation from MediaCore, the company who provide the platform and hosting that powers the service. There are some interesting developments in the pipeline.

In-video quiz prototype

• It is good to see research and thought has gone into this. The goal is that it should be designed and prototyped in accordance with educational theory and research and user community engagement. Reference to literature arguing that in an educational setting, videos shouldn’t just be passively consumed – you want the students actively engaging.
• They have also surveyed academics and technical staff regarding what they would want to do if there was a quizzing functionality. An interesting result was ‘discuss the responses in class’. Also teachers felt they would change the way they create videos if they had the quizzing functionality, so seen as having a strong pedagogical affordance.
• Also reviewed literature on quizzes/MCQs. Creating good ‘distractors’ (plausible wrong answers) and provision of response-contingent feedback (i.e. tells you why you are right or wrong) both seen as key.
• Design is also based on Bloom’s taxonomy with a view to enabling and encouraging teachers to consciously apply Bloom’s taxonomy in design of questions and feedback.
• Questions can be textual or image-based.
• Getting it working smoothly and making it easy to use is the priority. Integration with Moodle gradebook and similar via SCORM or other methods is further down the track, but the group generally felt this functionality will be more valuable for formative/reflective purposes anyway.

Now & next for the platform

• We are now using the new player.
• You can now embed whole collections (not from the Chooser in Moodle though).
• They now have epub support (i.e. you can upload an epub file as the main media item).
• Capture app already existed for iOS devices, and now exists for Android and Windows 8 (PC & tablet).
• Snagit integration allows upload of Snagit screencapture videos directly to MediaCore but there is a bug that is not displaying all the collections (this is currently with TechSmith to resolve).
• Plan for everything to be more responsive to device/screen size so it works and looks better.
• Planned new ‘super embed’ will allow a bunch of functionality from the site (e.g. collections, attached docs, download main media item) to be accessible from the embeds.
• User group members Javiera Atenas, Elizabeth Charles and Leo Havemann supplied recommendations regarding inclusion of licensing options (including the range of Creative Commons licences) and these will be incorporated into  the platform soon.
• Sharing assets across more than one collection is known to be our current major issue.
  
  

  This post was originally written for the Bloomsbury Learning Environment Blog

Birkbeck Special Blend Project Presented at HEA/SEEC Conference 2013

The HEA and SEEC held a combined conference on Flexible Learning at the University of Westminster in July. Along with Liz Drew who was part of the project team with me, I presented an overview of Special Blend, our Changing the Learning Landscape -assisted project which aimed to come up with a Birkbeck-flavoured approach to blended learning. The project morphed into a second phase which involved developing and then delivering a pilot module, Step Up to Postgraduate Study in Arts. The presentation slides are below.

Special Blend: Developing a Model for Technology-Enhanced, Flexible Learning 

Are Repositories Holding Back OER?

Are repositories holding back OER? - Presented at M25 Learning Technology Group, July 2013

Turnitin User Group meeting: Senate House, London, 15 February 2013

A meeting of the Turnitin UK User Group was held in London last week and the following represents my capture of points of interest from that meeting rather than a full record of all that was presented, but I hope this is of some use to the community.

1. Service Updates

Communication

Status updates: various options to be updated on this including email, Twitter, RSS. You can also enable mobile notification from the Twitter feed. They send updates on the US and UK services via the same Twitter account (TurnitinStatus) which many felt was unhelpful so perhaps this will be changed.

Product updates: there is now a Twitter feed for this as well (TurnitinProduct).

Support Portal

They have never had one but will now be implementing this – it will enable us to see all open cases and any progress they are making. This would enable us to have a Bloomsbury-wide overview of the service status as well as better visibility at the more granular level of individual support tickets.

Currently their plan is that there will be an additional charge as this has never been included in our licence cost. At the moment they are seeing this as something some clients will opt in to and pay for but I wonder if it wouldn’t be better to provide this for all customers as the cost would then be spread widely. Possibly HELF (the Heads of e-Learning Forum) could make this suggestion on behalf of UK HE if there is general agreement across the sector.

There is an opportunity to join the pilot of the system which seems like a good idea for Bloomsbury.

Plagiarism Website

Relaunched and improved with a lot of resources worth checking out – the conference proceedings from the last 10 years are now up. 

See: www.plagiarismadvice.org

2. Product Roadmap - General

Grademark

We were reminded to promote the online tutorial for Grademark. There are free/public rubrics available now (from the US) which we can download and adapt.

iPad App

This is due in beta in late February, with full launch in May – this allows you to sync the papers and mark offline, which is a very useful feature that is possible to implement for iPad but unfortunately not for Android (or for use on Windows / Mac laptops  either) at this time. Android may become a possibility (or at least certain devices). 

One point that concerned me was that it may not be totally straightforward for staff who use Turnitin integrated with Moodle (as ours exclusively do) unfortunately as they will need to find a one time access code in the Document Viewer to get them in to the relevant class via the iPad app.

Admin account interface (via the submit.ac.uk website)

There will be improvements to the interface and tools available to us.

Document viewer

This is the main interface Turnitin users ever see, which contains the Originality Report and Grademark views of the submissions. Version 2 is now in progress for release by the end of this year and should solve some of the persistent issues (but will be even less compatible with older browsers than the current one).

3. Product Roadmap - Integrations

Legacy API

(i.e. the current API all integrations are connecting to.) There are a lot of issues with the legacy API and a new one is under construction. This will resolve the prevalent 423 errors and will support use of Peermark by integration users.

Moodle Direct Integration

This is what we use in Bloomsbury. The new version of MD will connect via the new SOAP API. This will provide support for using Turnitin in the same way as users of the current ‘Dan Marsden’ plugin, which lets you use the normal Moodle assignment tool but still run an originality report. This may suit staff/departments which want the OR but don’t want to mark online.

It will be possible to download anonymous assignments (at the moment this function is switched off when anonymity is enabled, because Turnitin appends the student’s name when you download, so a code change will allow for downloading with names removed). The beta version of Moodle Direct v 2 is expected in May.

4. Guest Speaker 

Cheryl Reynolds (University of Huddersfield) - The JISC EBEAM Project

Cheryl presented an interesting case study of the implementation of Turnitin at Huddersfield under the auspices of EBEAM, which sought to drive uptake of online submission and marking. 

The emphasis was put on the benefits to staff. Lessons included: compulsion caused hostility. People will make the move in their own time, especially once colleagues are doing it.

Some tutors started using the new audio feedback option which students are responding very positively to – students in general felt the audio feedback was more personal and ‘human’ but it was also especially useful because of the greater accessibility of audio compared with text for visually impaired and dyslexic students.  

See more information about EBEAM here.