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Edstem.org is a discussion board platform some Schools in the College of Science and Engineering are piloting – including Informatics.
Edstem is being seen as a potential replacement for Piazza with a much more up-to-date interface – and is feature-comparable with Piazza.
EdStem has been Learn-LTI enabled for the School – there is an EdStem MS Team space set up for interested parties – contact the ILTS team for info.
The following Informatics courses are participating in the EdStem pilot for 2024/25:
Advanced Robotics
Algorithmic Game Theory and its Applications
Computing in the Classroom
Natural Language Understanding, Generation, and Machine Translation
Programming for Biomedical Informatics.
Please note that our EdStem instance is in the EU zone (DP / InfoSec reasons) – so course URLs will be https://edstem.org/eu/… – you may at times see a drop-down for region – select ‘Europe’.
Setting Up
This is only for those courses above. No other courses in Informatics should be using this for 24/25 – continue to use Piazza.
Step 1
Go to + Content Market and hit + EdStem Discussion to add a permanent link to your course. Link is hidden from students by default.
Step 2
Click on the + link. This will open up a modal above the content (not in a new tab) and after a sec will CREATE the EdStem discussion for this course – using Course Name and Id
This will do an initial sync of Learn users to the EdStem roster
Email addresses are of the form of <uun>@ed.ac.uk for both staff and students.
Staff or students will not have a password to begin with – you can add this via your profile icon (top right). Also add 2FA
At start of Semester 1 there is no SSO with EASE – students should be encouraged to come in via Learn – but also see Setting up a Password (optional) below.
Step3
Continue Setup then SKIP the Announcement. We recommend skipping the Announcement – as that will post an email to all participants (there’s no way to post without emailing – you do get a warning Post/cancel about this).
You probably don’t want to email students at the point of creation – you can add a Welcome announcement later.
Step 4: Using EdStem
You now have an empty course – you will need to make it visible to students in Learn when ready.
It is recommend you read https://edstem.org/help/ now – it is important that you and your TAs seed discussion. We recommend doing a show-and-tell with your TAs. You can be added to some test courses to try things out – contact the ILTS team if this is of interest.
If you want to add a welcome – you can add the Welcome Announcement you skipped over
There are advantages in setting up a password – it allows you to login by clicking on edstem links in emails, for example. Choose a good, secure password.
The Informatics Open Courseware service currently (as of January 2024) has a file upload size limit of 6MB. This is to ensure the performance of the site is not compromised at it continues to grow. If you have some files which currently exceed this size – and which could be reduced – then you may want to consider the following options.
Mac Users
PDF files
For Mac users, if you are looking to compress a small number of files, the Preview App is probably your best friend here. Open the PDF in Preview and choose File>Export. Select the Quartz Filter pop up menu and then select “Reduce File Size’.
Linux users may be interested in https://imagemagick.org/ – free, open source software for editing and manipulating digital images. This is especially useful for tasks requiring bulk image file manipulation.
It is vital that any third-party content you use in your teaching materials is cleared for copyright. This includes readings that you might set your students, images in your slides, or videos you share with them.
For course materials published on Drupal, the Course Organiser must ensure that all material posted on their course pages is copyright compliant.
Take a few minutes to read through this fantastic (and brief) summary from the University’s Open Educational Resources team about Copyright in Teaching and the three sub-pages detailing more about using book journals and texts, videos, broadcasts and sounds, and images. (If you need some background, check out What Is Copyright?) The University’s Open Educational Resources team run workshops on these topics, which you may be interested in attending; you can find more information about them here.
Readings
You should use the Library’s Resource List service for any essential / suggested readings. If you do not currently use this service, please familiarise yourself with it at your earliest convenience. It offers a lot of flexibility in terms of structure and layout to suit your course design. More information can be found on our blog post about Resource Lists.
Broadcast recordings and images
Some materials (often images or videos) are published under Creative Commons licenses, public domain, or other copyright cleared conditions and these may be available for you to use. However, ensure you that you check all the policies for the relevant license before you use them. If you are new to looking for images or other media you can use, Creative Commons is a great place to start. They provide great explanations, instructions on how to attribute what you use, and a search engine, which searches across a whole range of other platforms.
Below are a couple places you might be able to source materials to use in your teaching:
Are there any TV or radio programmes you want to share with your students? Check out Box of Broadcasts, which provides recordings you can share with your students (and unlike, say, BBC iPlayer videos, these won’t get deleted after a set time period!). This is service that the UoE subscribes to and which all students and staff can access.
The University’s Image Databases list is a great place to find other useful resources, some of which you will have access to only through your UoE account and others, such as Pixabay, Unsplash, and Creative Commons, anyone in the world can access.
Pre pandemic, supporting STEM teaching and assessment at scale had become a strategic focus for the College of Science and Engineering at the University of Edinburgh. However, as the world went into lockdown in Spring 2020, the University was forced to move at a speed not usually seen in such large institutions. Thankfully, a successful pilot of Gradescope by the School of Informatics meant we were able to identify an immediate solution to moving our assessment online.
Before bringing a third party tool in to service, a number of checks and processes are required. A Data Protection Impact Assessment (DPIA) has to be carried out. This has to be run past Legal Services and Information Security. In addition, an accessibility assessment needs to be carried out. As The Smiths once wrote, these things take time. Thankfully, as due diligence had been completed prior to the pilot in Autumn 2019, we were in a position to adopt a new service, and new ways of working, very quickly.
As we already had a relationship with Turnitin (who had recently bought Gradescope), expanding the contract was relatively smooth. The College could look at this as an opportunity to include a wider group of academics and professional service colleagues — from whom to gather feedback. We already knew from feedback from markers — in particular moderators — that marking at scale in Blackboard Learn was extremely cumbersome — and, at times, unworkable.
A hiccup
And so, we seemed primed to roll out Gradescope across the School of Informatics, as well as a selection of other Schools within the College. However, there was a bump in the road. Changes to the Safe Harbour rules meant we had to revisit the DPIA and work with Legal again to ensure we could continue to use a third party service based in the US, without compromising the privacy of our students’ data. All of this had to be completed by Schools, which were facing unprecedented workloads caused by the pandemic. Thankfully, we were able to negotiate a clause which satisfied Legal Services, and allowed us to continue to use Gradescope.
December 2020 Exams
We rolled out Gradescope as the default assessment platform for our exams in the December 2020 diet. The Homework Assignment assessment type was the preferred option, as we were keenly aware that many of our students were living under lockdown rules and may not have exclusive access to a device for the entire exam window. We wanted to ensure students could sit and submit their exams with the least amount of tech possible. They would need internet access at the start of the exam, to allow them to download their exam paper, and then again at the end of the exam, to allow them to upload their answers. A smart phone would be the most likely device they would have access to that would allow them to do this and, using one, they could easily scan their answers and upload them to Gradescope.
Students were able to access their exam papers and submit their answers without issue. Markers could enter their marks in an intuitive interface. Marks could be accessed without issue by the teaching office. The only thing that was missing was a decent anonymity feature. We worked around this by changing the names within the Roster from <Jane Doe> to <Anonymous User 1>. But this was an additional administrative burden we did not want to keep supporting. We took advantage of our close working relationship with the Gradescope team and requested a proper anonymity feature. Within a few months, it had been rolled out and worked pretty much exactly as requested. Anonymity can be toggled on and off with ease — with a consistent anonymous ID applied to each submission. Blackboard and Turnitin — please take note!
2021 Exams
The next exam diet to support was Spring 2021. We also widened the assessment types available to our academic colleagues. After a successful pilot of the Online Assignment by two academic colleagues, this was now seen as a potential format for both our online exams and coursework. Markers were becoming more and more became familiar with the Gradescope marking interface, and students could have confidence that their submissions had been received.
During this period, Victoria Dishon, Head of IT for the College of Science and Engineering, had also recruited a project manager to evaluate the implementation of Gradescope across the College. The report can be found here (link accessible to UoE staff only). In short:
65% colleagues in Informatics reported spending less time marking each paper, with 11% reporting an increase. This was principally down to a couple of courses wishing to mark vertically.
65% colleagues in Informatics reported spending less time on the administrative aspects of marking too.
2022 Hybrid Exams preparation
With Gradescope now the default platform for online exams, we were keen to keep the affordances of marking horizontally online, but to trial this with a return to students sitting invigilated exams on campus. This was primarily driven by concerns around instances of academic misconduct in online exams, but with no appetite to introduce online proctoring. To this end, we applied to College to request two exams be sat this way in the Spring 2022 diet (Probabilistic Modelling and Reasoning & Operating Systems).
Once College approved this, we began to work with the course organisers and teaching office colleagues to identify potential issues with this approach. To avoid confusion in the exam hall itself, the exam question papers were printed separate to the answer booklets. Personalised answer booklets were printed with the student name and exam number on the front cover (the name was included to make it easier for exam invigilators), and the exam number in the header of each subsequent page. The name would be blacked out with a sharpie prior to scanning for upload to Gradescope. The answer booklets were bound with a staple in the top left corner. It is this corner which would be cut prior to scanning. Stickers for identifying information were discounted as there were concerns this would jam the scanner. The exam answer booklets needed to have sufficient space for students to write their answers and some spare pages, as the template in Gradescope could not cope with pages being uploaded that it didn’t recognise. The reverse of each page of the answer booklet had a large note saying “Do not write on this page; Anything written on this page will not be scanned for marking” to ensure that students did not write any part of their answers on the back. This meant that the answer booklets could be scanned single-sided, which would help cut down on jams. Colleagues scrunched up, folded, and spilt water on sample answer booklets — anything we could think might happen in the exam hall — to help us prepare for any issues with the scanning process.
Gradescope was set up as a Homework / Problem Set type assignment with the option for the Instructor, rather than the Student, to upload the submissions. Then the answer booklet template was uploaded and used to create the assignment outline, using the exam number space at the top of the first page for their answers as the “ID Region”. A student roster was manually uploaded to Gradescope with the exam number as the Student ID. This meant that Gradescope should automatically be able to match the exam number indicated in the assignment outline to the correct student once the answers were uploaded.
Hybrid exams — what happened?
The student experience of sitting the hybrid exams has been straightforward. Sufficient blank pages were left in the answer booklets which meant that no additional pages were required. The Course Organisers were positive about the experience, as it meant they could continue to use Gradescope for marking, but also the way Gradescope was set up — with a template to auto-match the student submissions to each question on the exam — meant that there were no problems with mis-tagged questions, as there had been when students uploaded the exam themself.
The Teaching Office came up with a clear process for preparing the answer booklets (crossing out the name, cutting off the staple, etc.) and scanning them before uploading them to Gradescope. The large, general use Xerox printer / scanners were used for scanning; these send the scanned document through as a PDF via email.
There were mechanical problems, which meant that the scanning process ended up taking a lot more Teaching Office staff time than anticipated. The machines jammed which made the scanning process slow. Also, the lack of proper paper cutting implements meant that it was very difficult to cut through large page count booklets and left staff with blisters. Ideally, dozens of answer booklets could be scanned together into one document and then uploaded to Gradescope. Using the student exam numbers and the assignment outline, Gradescope would then be able to split all answer booklets contained into the file into individual submissions. However, due to jamming issues, only two answer books were able to be scanned together. This meant more time spent waiting over the scanner and more time selecting and uploading files to Gradescope.
What did we do?
These were not the biggest courses in the School and were only two of the 32 exams run in the School during the Spring 2022 diet. While the process for hybrid exams is now in place and does not need to be drastically changed for future diets, the Teaching Office staff time required to get the answers ready for marking was unsustainable.
Considering both the student experience, and the markers’ experience remained positive, and the frustrations experienced by the teaching office staff were mechanical related, we took the decision to invest in a dedicated scanner. Able to scan c150 pages / minute, we bought a Kodak i4000 series machine in time for the December diet.
As of the time of writing (August 2023) we have now run two full successful exam diets using the approach outlined above. Not only is this the experience of the School of Informatics, but many Schools across the College of Science and Engineering have reported similar results. Auto matching a script to a user has also dramatically increased in accuracy, after Gradescope responded to our feature request to hide the student name field to markers. This meant we could include two unique identifiers per script, with only one (non identifiable to the marker) being visible to the marker.
The Digital Skills Festival is run annually and with over 60 events scheduled covers a broad range of topics across all core areas of activity in the University.
Please circulate the information about the festival to colleagues and staff.
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The Digital Skills and Training team in Information Services are pleased to announce that the Digital Skills Festival is returning for its second year. The Festival is running between Monday 30th May and Friday 3rd June 2022, and it is free to attend to all University of Edinburgh students and staff.
Last year’s Festival was a great success with 54 events running throughout the week, attracting over 1000 attendees. The Festival won the Staff Development Forum Developing Excellent Practice Award for its collaborative approach, relevance and inclusivity.
This year, the Digital Skills Festival is larger and running in a hybrid format. Over 60 events are taking place throughout the week, some online and some in-person in our training rooms in Argyle House and the Main Library. Presenters from within and outside of the University will cover topics ranging from social media engagement to learning technology. The programme is sure to include something for everyone.
Take a look at the Digital Skills Festival website to browse the programme and book your place.
If you need to upload a video with two feeds (e.g. lecture slides and lecturer cam) to Media Hopper Create, this is possible through https://videomigrator.is.ed.ac.uk. When a video has dual feeds on Media Hopper Create, the user has full control over the size and location of both feeds while they watch the video. This is very useful for dynamic lecture videos when the focus changes between the two feeds and ensures the user can move the secondary feed out of the way of the main feed when needed. To upload a dual feed video:
Log in to the media migrator and choose the primary video file (the video feed that will be larger by default).
Create a title for this file (this title will be the one that appears for both feeds) and upload the primary video file.
After the primary video file has completed upload you will receive a success message.
You can now repeat this process to upload the second feed (the smaller feed that will hover on top).
The second feed also requires a title but this will not appear on the final video page.
The video with dual feeds will appear on your ‘My Media’ section on Media Hopper Create where you can then edit the video details and publish it.
This guide was written using macOS and an iPad. The Reflector software is available on Windows. Reflector can support any device using AirPlay, Google Cast or Miracast.
How to use record your iPad screen wirelessly on desktop using reflector: 1. Download and install the app here. 2. Click the Reflector app in the menu bar to see devices connected.
3. On the iPad, swiped down from the top right of the screen to access the control centre. Tap Screen Mirroring and select the desktop device you want to reflect to.
4. On the iPad image on the desktop, click the cog on the top left to choose a frame for the image and adjust the scale, device rotation and choose whether the mobile screen image floats on top. 5. Click the menu bar icon for Reflector, click the camera or microphone icon to choose to enable webcam and audio recording. Click Record all to begin the recording. 6. Click the red record button again on the iPad stream image to end the recording. Once the recording is finished you can give the recording a name and choose where to save it.
Advantages: -Reflector supports iOS devices using Airplay and Android devices using Google Cast. -Reflector allows you to reflect multiple devices to your desktop at once, allowing a simultaneous recording of both. -Ability to reflect devices wirelessly by using the same network is convenient and simple to set up. -Allows you to record screen of mobile device and webcam of desktop simultaneously. -Allows you to record screen of mobile device while hiding it on the desktop screen. -Places mobile device video feed on desktop screen. This means you can use other software to do a screen recording that will capture the desktop and mobile device simultaneously in one video file. -Allows you to use frames for the device’s feed e.g. you can make an iPad video stream look like an actual iPad device. -Changeable video quality settings, as well as different frame rate recording options to help decrease video file size. -Reflector teacher allows use with reflector director, reflector student and is preconfigured for classrooms.
Disadvantages: -Due to the connection to the mobile device being wireless, there is potential for lag in the recording if the network is weak. -The trial version of the app has a significant watermark on recordings. -Can’t screen record desktop and mobile device at same time on its own. -Difficult to change the scale of the image on the screen. -If mobile device recording is separate from other components of lecture recording, the 2 videos would need to be synced up after recording.
Alternative – How to record the iPad using QuickTime Player (wired connection):
Plug your iPad into your Mac and launch QuickTime Player, built into macOS.
On the app menu bar, click File>New Movie Recording.
On the video control panel, click the downward arrow beside the record button and select your iPad as the video and audio source.
Click the record button. When you are done recording click the stop button.
On 1 March, the IS User Experience (UX) Service, in partnership with the School of Informatics, ran a Learn usability testing showcase event. Participants from across the University watched screencasts of students using an Informatics Learn course, before prioritising the usability issues identified.
Five students in total took part in the testing – four from Informatics, including those enrolled on single programmes, joint programmes with other Schools, and those from our Undergraduate Apprenticeship Scheme – and one from the School of Economics. Each was presented with the following scenario and four ‘typical’ tasks to perform.
A copy of the Learn course for Computer Security was used for testing purposes. This was chosen as it aligned closely with the Learn template developed for the School.
Scenario
You’re a third year student on the joint programme BSc Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science. This semester you are studying a course called Computer Security. It’s week 3 of the course, and you’re preparing for your first piece of coursework.
Tasks
Task 1: You want to check the deadline for the first piece of coursework and see if it clashes with any other coursework deadlines. Using the Learn course site, find out the deadline for the first piece of coursework, and then see if it clashes with coursework deadlines for any other courses on which you are enrolled.
Task 2: You missed the third lecture of week 1 because of sickness. You’d like to watch the recording so you can catch-up. Using the Learn course site, find and play the third lecture of week 1.
Task 3: You’re going away for the weekend and you’d like to do some reading while you’re away. You’re not sure you’ll have access to the internet, so you’d like offline access to your reading. Using the Learn course site, find the required textbook for the course and see if you can download or print a section of the textbook.
Task 4: You’d like to familiarise yourself with the content of the last lecture you attended, called Cryptography – asymmetric encryption. Can you open the lecture notes from this lecture?
Results
Task 1: Most users found the coursework deadline relatively quickly and with ease. One student checked both the Course Information and Course Content pages prior to selecting the Coursework and feedback page.
However, no users were able to easily find the link to the personalised coursework planner. This was expected, and one of the reasons why I included it in the task.
Task 2: Most users found the link to the lecture recording overview page with relative ease. Some users were expecting to find a direct link in the table on the Course content page. This was not surprising as the Semester 1 course Informatics 1: Introduction to Computation includes this.
There was, however, a significant usability issue identified for all users when it came to identifying a particular recording from the Media Hopper Replay course overview page. This was caused by the unhelpful automatic naming convention of recordings (see below). Users performed a lot of cross-checking between different pages on Learn, various online calendars and and the Media Hopper Replay course overview page to identify the recording from the “third lecture of week 1”.
Task 3: The course organiser had used Leganto, the centrally supported Resource List tool, for the course. Users could access the text on Leganto via both an in-text link, or an icon associated with the service link. Most Informatics users found the link to the required textbook with relative ease. There was one instance of users navigating to the table on the Course content page where references to specific chapters are included.
This particular textbook was behind an EASE login. As the students were using a dummy account, they were prompted to enter their EASE credentials which would not be the case when logged in as themselves.
Interestingly, the student from Economics searched for the textbook by navigating to the Handbook. This highlights the different approach to content curation and the various roles course and programme handbooks perform across the University.
Task 4: Four users found the link to the lecture notes with ease. One (visiting) student initially checked the Coursework and feedback page. It was noted that the terms lecture notes and lecture slides are sometimes used interchangeably.
Action Points
Feature request for Media Hopper Replay team: can we automate naming of recordings by date? Venue information would also be helpful here.
Request for Media Hopper Replay team: can we facilitate production of individual URLs for each recording which will work for enrolled users – *even when they haven’t selected initial LTI link*. Only when this can be a achieved, should we encourage course instructors to include links to Media Hopper Replay recordings in the table on the Course Content page.
Promote coursework planner across the school. Posters / monitor displays etc.
Include a thumbnail of a ‘typical’ coursework planner in the next iteration of the template.
Can the coursework planner display full course name rather than acronym?
Enquire into possibility of responsive design for coursework planner.
Can we have the coursework planner work for tutors (eg marking loads)? Do we need this?
Work with the web and communication team to research how Informatics students use the yearly handbook.
Reflection
I thoroughly enjoyed working with Duncan Stephen on this mini project. The feedback was informative, encouraging, and a call to action. I’m looking forward to embedding similar practice across the School for alternative platforms for content delivery.
The results of the ‘prioritisation of issues’ aspect of the workshop can be found below. If you would like to know more about this particular round of testing, or would like to use your course for further testing, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Nbgrader Hackathon/Code Sprint
Scotland; James Slack (University of Edinburgh); james.slack@ed.ac.uk
The University of Edinburgh will be hosting a three-day community event focused using Jupyter notebooks within teaching. The core aspect of this event will be a Hackathon focused on adding improvements, fixes and extra documentation for the nbgrader extension. Alongside this, there is a plan to run introductory open workshops for using Jupyter in teaching, targeting local communities with some exposure to Jupyter as well as those new to Jupyter. Our key aim will be to improve the existing features within nbgrader. This will allow the existing Jupyter user community and new users to adopt and use this as an assessment tool alongside Jupyter notebooks. By enthusing our existing local Jupyter users to be more involved with the wider community and inviting new users to join, we will be increasing the diversity of opinion and experience within the Jupyter user community.
There will be occasions when you are looking to facilitate a particular workflow not currently supported by learning technology central services. Sometimes, workarounds need to be found. However, there may be occasions when, working with our colleagues in Information Services, we can build something which does achieve the desired aim.
In my time as learning technologist for Edinburgh College of Art, I worked with IS Apps colleagues to build a building block for Learn which vastly improved the experience of students accessing learning outcome level grades and feedback via Learn. You can read about the project here.
If you have an idea as to how you can improve current workflows – for academic colleagues, support colleagues, or students – please get in touch to discuss further.
