A year in the life of the Elevate Team blog

The Elevate Team blog is the central communication tool for the Elevate Team. It is the communication channel which helps us meet our broad aims;

• Help staff to integrate innovative technologies to enhance their teaching programmes


• Share innovation and good practice through facilitating an active community


• Evaluate the impact of enhancements on the student learning experience


• Develop and pilot ways to enhance and develop learning through innovative technologies

Therefore, a question for us is, to what extent is it being used, and our people engaged with it?

In terms of use, we have focussed on disseminating the enhancement aspects of our activities, and less around service news (performance and availability) of our key services. We are seeing regular blog posts from the team, and the wider UCS teaching community. An encouraging development is the re-tweeting of some blog posts. This indicates a sharing of innovation and good practice. An aspect which we've not encouraged, but do need to, is the use of comments. This is important if the tool is to facilitate an active community.

So, back to the questions at the start? Well, a quick  review of Google Analytics indicates people are engaging with the blog. A fuller picture is evident from:

• https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AsaF5QN3s_UDdElEM0RGSnA4S29MaGxnUFRySkJQSHc

We are seeing an increase in absolute visitors per month, with over 670 in September 2011. It is encouraging to see the return rate (vs new visitors) is nearly 50%. Therefore, over the year, one out of every two visits was someone returning to the blog. In terms of where these people are located, we are clearly focussing on our region (which is want you'd expect), with the vast majority of people accessing the resource from Ipswich, London or Norwich. Interestingly, we do have an increasing international following, with the people in the USA, Brazil and France regularly being in the top three locations. This international dimension is evident from the image, which indicates we have had visitors from all over the world

Interactive poster experiment - why does the price of a coffee change?

We have been interested in exploring the idea of developing Interactive Posters, where we would use both QR Codes and Augmented Reality to enable the reader to connect to additional multimedia based learning material. A scenario might be where a student submits a poster as part of an assignment, this includes quick scan links to resources, raw data, literature reviews, simulations and models. This would enable them to layer in a richer experience. Alternatively, it might be researchers disseminating their findings.

An example is linked below. The plan to pin a number of these posters around campus and monitor the usage during January 2012. We are interested in seeing a number of things, for instance does anyone actually scans them, access the resources and submit their feedback? However, a key driver for this piece of work is as a proof of concept for demonstration to staff at UCS.

A second piece of work will include using the Aurasma application to deliver of the enhanced functionality.



 

Wiki, Blogs and Podcasts - License Expiry Message in Wolsey - RESOLVED

Unfortunately we are still waiting for the license key to arrive from the software vendors, which has been delayed, resulting in an expired license.

Both staff and students will receive a warning page when trying to access Wikis, Blogs and Podcasts that are provided through the Learning Objects company.

Apologies to all for this inconvenience, I will update here once we know more.

All licenses have now been updated so this message will no longer appear.

SafeAssign Downtime - 27th December 2011

We have received notification that SafeAssign will be taken offline on December 27th for maintenance and performance upgrades.

Below is the message we have received:

SAFEASSIGN MAINTENANCE UPDATE:
The SafeAssign service will be unavailable on Tuesday December 27, 2011 from 2:00 PM until Tuesday December 27, 2011 at 8:00 PM. SafeAssign is being taken offline for a maintenance upgrade. Upon completion of this upgrade, the RSS feed will be updated to indicate SafeAssign is back online and available.

This maintenance upgrade will improve hardware failover and upgrade the software. In conjunction with version 2.4.11 of the SafeAssign Building Block to be released at the same time, this software upgrade will include several maintenance fixes, including:

• SafeAssign now displays submissions for courses that have larger rosters and SafeAssignments without significant delay. GMNIBB- 163


• SafeAssign now allows downloading of SafeAssignments that contain the forward slash (/) character in the titled. GMNIBB-168


• The correct Feedback file is attached on the SafeAssignment grade. GMNI-249
  

We are hopeful that the 3rd point above will resolve the long running issue that we have had regarding feedback not staying associated with the correct students.

During this outage SafeAssign will be unavailable. End-users will not be able to submit papers through SafeAssign during the planned downtime and will receive an error message if they attempt to do so. SafeAssign Originality Reports will not be available to Instructors or Students during the planned downtime, nor will Instructors be able to access SafeAssign DirectSubmit. Please make end-users aware of these limitations. Use of SafeAssign can continue as normal after the planned downtime are complete.

Please do not re-submit
SAFEASSIGN PERFORMANCE UPDATE:
SafeAssign is experiencing regular delays due to load on the system. In one sense, the cause of these delays is quite simple: the rate of papers being submitted exceeding the speed with which SafeAssign can process papers. Submissions go into a queue, and are processed in a first-in, first-out order. When the submissions are entering the queue faster than they are processed, a backlog builds up. Normally, SafeAssign catches up on that backlog when the submission rate drops below the processing rate. However, because of record high usage we've been pretty consistently running over capacity 24 hours a day for several weeks now (except for the US Thanksgiving weekend). So the system never fully has the time to catch up, resulting in turnaround times of 12-24 hours in many instances.

Given projections from historical usage, the significant delays of 12-24 hours or more will continue through the first week of December and then rapidly ease off in mid-December as the semester closes. Clients should expect that they will not see any significant improvement in turnaround times before mid-December. Please do not re-submit papers that have not received a matching report to prevent creating an even larger backlog.

From a development perspective, the current focus on SafeAssign is scalability and improving turnaround time of submissions. We hope to be able to deploy further improvements in this area early next year. 

SafeAssign not Returning Plagiarism Score Reports

We have received notification from Blackboard that the SafeAssign plagiarism software has had a technical problem and was taken offline to be reconfigured.  The service is now backup and running, but a large backlog of submission has occurred.

This means that if you have had or have due, student submissions, the plagiarism reports will not be produced as quickly as normal, we have had some reports taking over 24 hours at present.

Unfortunately there isn't anything that can be done to speed up the process, we just need to wait for the reports to arrive.

Sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.

 

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I have just received more detail from Blackboard:

SafeAssign is experiencing regular delays due to load on the system. In one sense, the cause of these delays is quite simple: the rate of papers being submitted exceeding the speed with which SafeAssign can process papers. Submissions go into a queue, and are processed in a first-in, first-out order. When the submissions are entering the queue faster than they are processed, a backlog builds up. Normally, SafeAssign catches up on that backlog when the submission rate drops below the processing rate. However, because of record high usage we've been pretty consistently running over capacity 24 hours a day for several weeks now (except for the Thanksgiving weekend). So the system never fully has the time to catch up, resulting in turnaround times of 12-24 hours in many instances.

Given projections from historical usage, the significant delays of 12-24 hours or more will continue through the first week of December and then rapidly ease off in mid-December as the semester closes. Clients should expect that they will not see any significant improvement in turnaround times before mid-December.

From a development perspective, the current focus on SafeAssign is scalability and improving turnaround time of submissions. In 2011-2012, we have a two-phase project to improve performance. Phase 1, executed over the summer, was replacement, upgrade, and expansion of the entire hardware environment in which SafeAssign runs. This was necessary to assure being able to move SafeAssign forward. However new/additional hardware is not the sole solution to the problem, as some bottlenecks in processing are a result of the application itself. The second phase, underway this fall and into 2012, is a detailed performance analysis of the SafeAssign application itself to determine the bottlenecks in the processing that continue to create backlogs/slowdowns, and to identify the associated development effort to rectify those bottlenecks.

There are some improvements that have already been identified. We will be put these initial improvements in place as soon as possible. At this time, though, we are not able to quantify the impact of these planned changes on turnaround time, as the performance analysis is ongoing.

Using Clickers in Teaching and Learning

As we near the end of the calendar year, we've seen a steady growth in interest for the clickers (audience response systems) at UCS Ipswich. Between September and December 2011, we have had 28 bookings (excludes bookings for Student Induction), from 13 people (so lots of repeat bookings).

There seems to be more discussion around effective use of Clickers in face to face teaching to promote more student interaction, feedback and reflection. To help this process, when asked where should I start when thinking about using Clickers in my teaching, I'd suggest the following the following guide, coffee and cake. This spend time on discussing the effective implementation plans. The summary from the Instructors guide to effective use of personal response systems (clickers) in Teaching, is

• Clickers are not a magic bullet – they are not necessarily useful as an end in themselves. Clickers become useful when you have a clear idea as to what you want to achieve with them, and the questions are designed to improve student engagement and instructor-student interaction.


• What clickers do provide is a way to rapidly collect an answer to a question from every student; an answer for which they are individually accountable. This allows rapid reliable feedback to both you and the students.


• Used properly, clickers can tell you when students are disengaged and/or confused, why this has happened, and can help you to fix the situation.


• The best questions focus on concepts you feel are particularly important and involve challenging ideas with multiple plausible answers that reveal student confusion and generate spirited student discussion.


• A common mistake is to use clicker questions that are too easy. Students value challenging questions more and learn more from them. Students often learn the most from a question that they get wrong.


• For challenging questions, students should be given some time to think about the clicker question on their own, and then discuss with their peers.


• Good clicker questions and discussion result in deeper, more numerous questions from a much wider range of students than in traditional lecture.


• Listening to the student discussions will allow you to much better understand and address student thinking.


• Even though you will sacrifice some coverage of content in class, students will be more engaged and learn much more of what you do cover.


• When clickers are used correctly, students overwhelmingly support their use and say they help their learning.

You can access a full copy of An Instructors Guide to the Effective Use of Personal Response Systems (Clickers) in Teaching from University of British Columbria from http://www.colorado.edu/sei/documents/clickeruse_guide0108.pdf

 

Visual Browsing & Augmented Reality - An update

I just wanted to give a quick update on the app that we used for the quick demo shown in this post "Visual Browsing and Augmented Reality", we have a number of teams at UCS interested in this technology.  One of the teams is the Marketing department who are looking to "spice up" the next prospectus, allowing prospective students to get a much more media rich experience just by picking up a printed hardcopy prospectus.

The real reason for this update is due to an update to the Aurasma Developer Studio, Aurasma are now allowing you to re-skin their app with your own branding.  So instead of getting users to download the "Aurasma" app from the app store you can point those users to the app store to download the "UCS" app, it will have full branding, splash screens, icons all of our own design etc.  As well as that, if you chose to you can also download the "Kernel" to allow you to embed the Aurasma technology into an existing app.

This is a really good step forward, and I'm sure will enhance the experience for many.

Currently this development is for iOS devices, but Aurasma are expecting to release the updates for Android devices soon.

sharing and displaying ideas using iBrainstorm on the iPad

Aaron and David have been exploring the use of iBrainstorm to share a note from one iPad / iPhone / iPod to an iPad to be projected. The scenario would be around collecting ideas from students during a face to face teaching session (assuming they all had i-devices ... which is unlikely). In fact, we will be using it at the Learning Resources Development Day in January, 2012. In this scenario people will be working in pairs to answer a number of key questions. Their answers will be written on their ipad, and flicked (the power of the finger) to the session facilitators iPad for projecting. The notes will be arranged (clustered) by the presenter and we'll share the outcomes as a record of the activity.

So given our actual need, what is it and how does it work?

There are two applications which will need to be installed on an iPad (see http://ibrainstormapp.com/). The iBrainstorm app which acts as the master to be run on the facilitators device, and the iBrainstorm Companion (which is the iPhone app but can be run on an iPad) which lets the audience send notes to the presenter.

We'll feedback on how it went after the Elevate Team have run the iPad training for the Library and Learning Development teams at the end of this term.