LTA Podcasts

In this podcast Dr Claire Garden and Joan McLatchie discuss their use of Turnitin, an online text matching service. There are still many misconceptions about plagiarism detection tools and Claire discusses her use of a checklist to help students understand their Turnitin reports and staff to think about how they use Turnitin, allowing them to evaluate their own reports. This has freed up staff time on large modules and enabled us to engage in discussion with students about good scholarship such as paraphrasing. It supports the use of Turnitin as a tool to support scholarship as well as detecting plagiarism.

To visit Dr Garden’s case study in the resource bank please click here >http://staff.napier.ac.uk/services/academicdevelopment/LTA/resources/Pages/Details.aspx?ItemID=36&Section=CS

To listen to the podcast click here Turnitin Complete

Welcome to another LTA podcast from Edinburgh Napier University.

This podcast is from Sara Wasson, Senior Teaching Fellow/Senior Lecturer in the School of Arts and Creative Industries at Edinburgh Napier University. Sara describes how she introduced reading diaries to help students of English develop their confidence and skills in reading challenging texts.  

Where reading material for modules is difficult, a ‘reading diary’ assessment, can be used with two aims in mind: (a) to nurture student confidence and (b) to actively encourage students to seek out areas of challenge.  

Student responses to the reading diaries were excellent.  In addition to commenting very favourably on the assessment mode itself, student work was strikingly strong, students rising to the challenge and engaging with areas they were not sure they understood and actively leaving their comfort zone.  The structures we set in place to support their confidence during this adventure seemed to help a great deal.

Have a listen to the podcast from Sara herself to hear more about how this approach may be of benefit to students in your own discipline. Reading Diaries podcast

To visit the case study in the Edinburgh Napier LTA Resource Bank please click here > http://staff.napier.ac.uk/services/academicdevelopment/LTA/resources/Pages/Details.aspx?ItemID=6&Section=CS

In this week’s podcast we interview Professor Bill Buchanan for the School of Computing at Edinburgh Napier University. His module on advanced security techniques to BEng (Hons) and MSc students has one of the most extensive integrations of information infrastructures. For example, it uses iTunes lectures, which are converted from the stand-alone and Web-based versions. The module overall supports all types of learning, making sure that there is a range of on-line material, all of which is also available in a printed form.
The main advantage of the infrastructure is that students can learn in whatever way they prefer. As a core there is an extensive teaching pack, which has the notes, tutorials, coursework, labs and so on. This material is then scaled to the full range of online material, with full online lectures, on-line tutorials, online virtualised labs, online demonstration of the lab-based work, full iPhone lectures, fun activities (drag-and-drop, and fun tests), a unique simulator package, and much more.

Hear what Professor Buchanan has to say about this in the interview here Bill Buchanan Podcast

To find out more about this and see other case studies please visit our Learning, Teaching and Assessment Resource Bank which is available at http://staff.napier.ac.uk/LTA

Marking season is upon us! This podcast introduces a tool developed by Frank Greig, from the School of Computing which makes providing feedback to large classes, easy. Tight timescales for marking, and the submission of marks, means that we have to be efficient.

MarkItEasy produces individualised student feedback reports in PDF format which can be emailed to your students. MarkItEasy is simple to install, quick to learn and easy to use. You get a consistent look-and-feel to your feedback, it’s readable, and the comments manager allows you to build and reuse comments as you mark. The underlying principle is that you get more efficient as you mark. As you mark through a cohort of assessments, you build a table bespoke in a comments list, and these can be added to the remaining student’s feedback at the click of a button. Simple and quick! Obviously, comment lists are recyclable, simply import them for reuse in the next round of assessments.

Listen to the podcast: MarkItEasy (8:17)

To visit the case study on MarkItEasy in the LTA resource bank click this link: http://staff.napier.ac.uk/services/academicdevelopment/LTA/resources/Pages/Details.aspx?ItemID=39&Section=CS

This week’s podcast focuses on the usefulness of audio feedback. Feedback is an important issue for both students who receive it, and for academics who constantly seek effective ways of providing feedback. Elaine Mowat, Academic Development Advisor, from the Office of the Vice Principal (Academic), lead the ‘Talking about feedback’ project at Edinburgh Napier during Tri 2 of 2009/10. This involved 9 lecturers from across the University using audio feedback on students’ work.

In this podcast Elaine reports some of the findings from the pilot and discusses the experiences from the student and lecturers’ evaluation of the project, and provides some useful suggestions for using audio files to provide student feedback.

To listen to the podcast click here Talking about feedback podcast (9:21)

For more case studies on feedback from the LTA Resource Bank please visit our website at http://staff.napier.ac.uk/LTA or to visit the University’s Feedback for Learning campaign site visit https://studentportal.napier.ac.uk/University/FeedbackForLearning/Pages/home.aspx