All teaching staff will need to interact with Learn Ultra, even if the course materials are hosted on Drupal. We have compiled links to instructions on the most common tasks you will need to perform in Learn below. If you do not see what you need below, please check out the following page, which has additional instructions and guidance materials on a range of other aspects of Learn Ultra: Using Learn as an Instructor.

Introduction to Learn Ultra: a series of short videos providing an overview of Ultra and how to navigate the site.

Adding and organising content:

• Types of Course Content – start here to get a definition of the terminology used for content types in Ultra
• Learning Modules and Folders
• Adding Documents
• Web and course links*
• Copying content in Learn Ultra
• Add a video to your course

*If you want to share a link with students to a file you have uploaded to the Content Collection for a course, you will need to adjust the permission settings in the Content Collection folder following these instructions from Blackboard.

Assessment and marking:

Please remember that the Course Secretary is now in charge of setting up most assignment submissions (other than things like CodeGrade or authoring quiz questions), so please contact the ITO about the creation of assignment submission boxes. Below we have provided links for guidance on accessing student submissions and how to give marks and feedback.

For Learn Assignments:

• Marks and Gradebook, Feedback, additional information on marking and the Gradebook
• Uploading marks (and feedback) to Learn Ultra
• Creating and managing tests

For Turnitin assignments:

• See the Marking, Feedback and Grading section here

For Gradescope assignments:

• See our blog post Marking an exam or homework assignment in Gradescope

Tools:

• Communicating with your students (incl. Announcements and how to email a Group in Learn)
• Managing Groups and Group Import and Export
• If you don’t use Piazza for your course, you can set up a discussion board in Learn. This can be linked to Groups, so that students can talk to their group members: Create and manage Discussions
• Adding tools to your Learn course (e.g. Zoom, CodeGrade, Noteable): Adding Tools via Content Market; for more on Zoom, see Adding a Zoom session to your Learn Ultra course

Note: All students, the Course Organiser, and Course Secretary will be automatically enrolled on the Learn course via a feed from EUCLID. All other teaching staff (i.e. additional lecturers and teaching support staff) will be enrolled via a feed from the School’s own databases; teaching support staff will only be enrolled in Learn once their contract is confirmed in PiP.

Note: Due to an ongoing bug in Learn Ultra, if you upload feedback to submission box in Learn, it will not be visible to students. If you want to upload feedback for an assignment that students submitted to via Learn, follow the instructions below to create a new “item” directly within the Gradebook itself, which (for some reason!) allows students to view the feedback you upload. Update: This bug appears to have been fixed, but let us know if you encounter any problems with the visibility of feedback for students.

1. Go to the Gradebook in the course Learn page.
2. Add a new Item to the Gradebook by hovering over where you want to add it in the list and clicking on the purple (+) when it appears and then select “Add Item”.

Then make the following adjustments when the item settings window opens:

• It will give the item the default name of “New Item and the current date”; change this to the actual assignment’s name to ensure that students can locate it easily.
• We recommend keeping this item hidden from student view for now.
• The due date doesn’t really matter for this, so you can leave it as the default of the current time.
• Set the marking as required (points, percentage, etc.) and, if points, the maximum number possible for this assignment.
• For “Mark category”, choose Assignment.
• Add a description if you want, but it’s not required.
• Press Save.

3. Download the Gradebook, selecting just the new item that you created. Make sure to tick the option to include Feedback (unless you just want to upload marks, in which case, leave it unticked). Choose to save it as an xlsx file and save it to your computer.

4. Open the file on your device.
5. Make sure that the header for Column G is the assignment you want to be uploading marks for (i.e. the item you just created in the Gradebook).
6. Input the marks in Column G.
7. Input the feedback in Column J, if you need to share this with students.

Note: Make sure you do not change the header of any of the columns or Learn may not be able to read the file properly when you upload the marks. If you need to copy and paste data from another spreadsheet, make sure that it aligns with the columns as laid out in the file you downloaded from Learn.

8. Save the file.
9. Return to the Gradebook in Learn and now select “Upload Gradebook”.

10. Choose “Upload Local File” and select the spreadsheet you have just saved. Once it has loaded, untick the option for “Select All” and just leave the assignment you want to upload marks for ticked. Click “Upload”.

11. Once Learn has uploaded the document, you will see how many students there are not marks for (i.e. those who did not submit the assignment) and also the option to post the marks that you just uploaded.

12. Before you post the marks, it’s worth quickly checking that your upload worked. Click on the assignment name and you will be taken through to a list of all the students on the course. You can then check the a few of their marks and feedback in Learn with your spreadsheet to make sure that the upload worked properly.

Note: If you only want to post marks to certain students, you can do that from this view. Just click the “Post” button next to the name(s) of the student(s) whose marks you are to post.

13. Once you are ready to share the marks with the students, Click to Post the marks. And then “Post All Marks” when the dialogue box opens.
14. Go back in to the Edit view of the assignment (by clicking the three dots … at the end of the row for it) and from the drop-down menu choose to make it “Visible to students”. Press Save. The students will now be able to view their marks and feedback for this assignment.

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

Grading a Simple Question

Some tips

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.

An overview is available via the video below:

Grading Even Faster with Keyboard Shortcuts

Practice exam

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:

• https://trello.com/b/36UN761q/gradescope-roadmap