In this post, Stuart Nicol outlines the new Flexible Grading View interface in Learn Ultra, which will provide an improved marking experience for teachers and course teams to view, and leave feedback on, student assignments and tests in Learn. Stuart is the Head of the Educational Design and Engagement (EDE) section in Information Services Group. This post is the last in the series of the March-June Learning & Teaching Enhancement theme: Assessment and feedback revisited, and also belongs to the Spotlight on Learn Ultra series.
Our University’s Feedback and Assessment Principles and Priorities advise that “wherever practical, assessments will be completed, submitted, marked and feedback provided in digital format.” It is essential that we work towards usable and accessible practices involving digital tools for assessment and feedback. Flexible Grading View is a new assessment and feedback interface that will be available to all staff in our Learn virtual learning environment (VLE) from 25th June (2024).
Flexible Grading View will provide an improved marking experience for teachers and course teams to view, and leave feedback on, student assignments and tests in Learn. To find out more about the new improved features, visit our Learn Ultra support site, or attend one of our online demo sessions that will be running from June through to September (booking available on People and Money).
If you teach, or support teaching, here at The University of Edinburgh then you should be aware that Learn, the hub of online teaching, recently upgraded. One of the advantages of upgrading is that we get access to the newest features and fixes that Learn has to offer, like Flexible Grading View. Whereas minor improvements happen on a monthly basis (check our Learn Ultra blog regularly for up-to-date information), more significant changes come with the option for us to decide when is the best time to turn them on, and to prepare appropriate communications and training for all users.
Put simply, Flexible Grading View is a new interface onto the existing marking functions in Learn assignments; all the familiar features will be there. This might seem like a relatively small thing (and it is). However, any interface change is important in terms of the way we interact with technology on a day-to-day basis; ultimately it will have impacts on teaching and administering practices.
Lesley Gourley’s (2021) chapter on Interfaces positions the VLE as an educational technology within a long history of artefacts associated with the processes of higher education. Gourley’s foray into Posthumanism and the Digital University is a useful reminder that although digital technologies have transformed higher education over the past 20 to 30 years, technology in one form or another has always co-existed with educational practices. Gourley also usefully positions technology not just as a tool, or instrument, that human teachers use, but as an actor with its own agency and influence within our teaching practices. By taking the agency of technologies seriously we can notice how something as innocuous as an interface change within an existing platform can have the potential to change teaching practices – in expected, and sometimes unexpected, ways.
How can Flexible Grading View improve marking workflow?
In relation to our assessment and feedback practices, this new interface has the potential to improve marking workflows in a number of ways:
- marking tests by question across students;
- making it easier to move between student papers;
- providing more screen real estate for interacting with a student’s assignment;
- quickly switching between one student’s attempts (if enabled);
- collapsible grading panels to improve focus.
Watch our video introduction to Flexible Grading View for a quick guide to how this looks. Many of these features will be welcome time-savers for markers who are navigating and marking student work in Learn, which speaks to assessment and feedback priority 7.1: that “learning technologies shall be used to facilitate efficient, user-friendly and effective assessment, marking and feedback for students and staff.”
Moving forwards: Learn Ultra and Turnitin deep integration
The new Learn interface has laid the groundwork for what could be a far bigger move towards improved assessment and feedback practice in our University.
Currently, multiple tools are embedded within the VLE to handle the same types of assessment. Although choice can be a good thing, usability studies that we have carried out over previous years clearly show that students prefer a level of consistency (the removal of needless inconsistency). Consistency for web components that have the same functionality is also a key premise of digital accessibility.
If we look at one of the most popular assignment types – the formal academic essay – there are at least two ways of submitting and marking them: through a Learn drop box; or through a Turnitin drop box. Many colleagues will choose to use the Turnitin drop box because of the similarity checking functionality, currently only available when using the Turnitin submission route. Once submitted, markers will be driven to use the Turnitin Feedback Studio to mark and give feedback to students. This is far less integrated than a native Learn assignment.
However, in the coming months Flexible Grading View will introduce a deep integration with Turnitin enabling colleagues to use the Learn assignment for submission, and marking direct from the Gradebook, whilst obtaining an originality score from Turnitin (the originality score is optional). With this change, we can think about moving towards a single tool for submitting essay assignments and a single way of returning feedback to students; a needless inconsistency is removed.
Although Flexible Grading View will be available to all for the coming academic year, we will be piloting the Turnitin integration with a limited number of courses through semester 1. We will also shortly be launching the LOUISA project (Learn Optimised for In-course Submissions and Assessment), the next phase of VLE Excellence, to improve both the student and staff experience. Watch out for the new Flexible Grading View in Learn from 25th June (2024), and look out for more about the LOUISA project in the coming months – we will be communicating widely about it.
Reference
Gourlay, L. (2021) Posthumanism and the Digital University: Texts, Bodies and Materialities. London, New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
Stuart Nicol
Stuart is the Head of the Educational Design and Engagement (EDE) section in Information Services Group. EDE are responsible for delivering a number of services to the University, including: advice, consultancy, and training for learning technologies; Learning Design (ELDeR); support for online learning, including MOOCs; and support for open education resources. Stuart joined The University of Edinburgh in 2007, initially in the School of History, Classics, and Archaeology, moving to what is now EDE in 2011. He has a master’s degree in Digital Education from The University of Edinburgh, and continues to have an interest in critical approaches to open education and practice.
