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The Teaching Hour, in the School of Informatics, on February 24th 2022, focussed on “How to use your teaching support budget to best effect”.
Abstract from the event: “In Informatics course organisers have a budget to spend on employing staff and students as teaching support: tutors, demonstrators, teaching assistants, markers and any other roles help to support teaching and learning on courses. In this session colleagues detailed what the various teaching support roles are and who can take them on. They then illustrated and discussed different choices of learning activities in examples of Informatics courses”.
The recording from the session can be viewed, via Media Hopper Create, at this link here. And the slides used during the session can be viewed, via Sharepoint, at this link here.
The Informatics Teaching Festival is back for a second consecutive year.
Join us for the opportunity to:
hear interesting presentations around lessons learned in the past year and good practice in online/hybrid teaching from colleagues and inspiring speakers from other schools
listen to the feedback provided by student representatives regarding their experience with studying in an online/hybrid context
listen to the feedback provided by teaching support and administrative staff as to their experience with teaching and administration this past year
learn about new approaches to teaching and educational software
share your own experience with teaching delivery, student support and course administration during workshops and informal GatherTown meetings
reflect and come up with ideas together for improving our delivery of online and hybrid teaching, both as a school and in our different courses.
If you’d like to attend any of the following sessions, and are not a member of the School of Informatics, please register your interest here, and a Collaborate link will be emailed to you in advance of the session(s).
There are many times when you may need to check submission dates and times for coursework or exam hand-ins. The way you do so will depending on the mechanism used to submit.
The following instructions are for when a student has submitted via the Gradescope link within Learn.
Go to the course in Learn and find and select the link to Gradescope.
Select the assignment name within Gradescope to open. Select Review Grades.
Sort by the Time column header to see which submissions were made after the deadline.
This blog post is aimed at all students sitting an exam or submitting coursework using Gradescope Homework assignment.
Submitting your PDF to Gradescope
Navigate to the appropriate area in your Learn course (this will be the “Exam” content area for taking an exam, or the “Assessment” area if submitting coursework)
Open Gradescope by clicking “Submit via Gradescope”
Gradescope will open in a new tab
You will be taken directly to the corresponding course area in Gradescope
Open the submission area for the question
Select the file you wish to upload for your answer – this can be uploaded directly from your device. Upload your file – note that Gradescope does not provide a progress bar, and so it will look like nothing is happening while your file submits. Please be patient and do no click Back or Submit again while you wait.
You will be shown a preview of your submission. You can rearrange pages if required.
You will be required to tag which pages from your document correspond to the question part being answered. If your answer to a particular section spans multiple pages please tag each corresponding page. Please also make sure you have labelled each page with a note of which question you are answering. This tagging process takes place after the submission and can be done after the submission deadline without affecting your timestamp for submitting your response.
Check all pages have been tagged correctly, and confirm your submission by clicking Submit.
Video Demonstration of the PDF Upload & tag process
Gradescope is now the School of Informatics’ default platform for marking exams and some coursework assignments.
The technology takes a much more innovative approach to marking which better aligns to the standard practices for marking paper-based exams, with some added benefits over traditional marking.
Horizontal marking (i.e. Mark papers by question) by default
Rubric based marking, with the option of dynamic edits which recalculate previously marked papers
Inline annotation / notes for markers
The exam spaces and initial setup is now managed by the ITO team.
Marking Submissions
You’ll find detailed help and guidance from the Gradescope Help section, but some key elements and videos have been highlighted in this article.
Horizontal Marking
The preferred marking workflow is to mark each question across all submissions, rather than marking a whole paper one submission at a time. The interface for marking is set up this way to apply your mark to the question and then proceed to the next ungraded question.
Rubric Marking
The points per question will be setup prior to the exam. The rubrics will use positive marking by default. Ahead of the exam, course organisers will have a chance to discuss with ILTS how they want their rubric initially setup for all questions. One of the key features for Gradescope is that the rubric can change and be adapted throughout the marking process with the changes being reflected in papers that have already been marked.
Making changes to the rubric can be done by any marker and could be for the following reasons:
Tagging responses marked in a certain way
Tagging responses for additional review
Awarding partial points based on certain criteria
Realising the original rubric design needed altered
Students map their questions to the pages submitted
As part of the submission process students are asked to map which questions have been answered on which page of their PDFs. Some question components may be answered across multiple pages. You can check to see if there is an additional page by using the next arrow or using the “K” keyboard shortcut.
Rubric components can be scored the same and culminative
You can use rubric components for identifying features of how a question has been answered. You can award a rubric item the same points as any other rubric element. This allows you to allocate marks while identifying features of how the question was answered. You can then report on the marking breakdown by each rubric component to get a detailed understanding of how each question was answered across the cohort.
You can select more than one rubric element for each question and the score can build a running total. These settings can be customised and configured as required.
Moderation during the marking process
A suggested workflow for moderation during the marking process is as follows:
CO marks first sample of questions to confirm the rubric fits well
Markers continue to mark remaining questions
CO reviews rubric changes and areas for attention in stages throughout the marking process
Papers can be filtered based on the rubric criteria to look for anomalies
Standard moderation after marking can still take place
Keyboard Shortcuts
To help speed up marking Gradescope uses a number of keyboard shortcuts to apply the rubric components using the number keys, and you can traverse your stack of marking using a number of keyboard shortcuts.
Finally, we would like to stress the importance of running a practice exam, using Gradescope accessed via Learn. As with the real exams, the ILTS team will set these up, but you should identify a suitable timescale to run these, and ensure all students have completed this process prior to the date of their real exam.
Feature requests?
If you are interested in the development of Gradescope, you can view and contribute towards their roadmap here:
