The final NELE meeting of the year took place at Newcastle University, and we began by looking at Northumbria and Durham’s experience of piloting Turnitin’s new user interface for Feedback Studio. It ‘looks’ good, modern and fresh, and there are some good additional features, such as the ability to link Quick Marks to parts of a rubric, but there are also missing features such as peer marking and audio feedback; features not working quite as they should, such as anonymous marking being rendered somewhat moot by the ‘Reveal Identity’ button; and perennial issues which remain unresolved, such as the infinitely nested scroll bars in the rubric view (first photo).
Next up, the team at Newcastle talked about their ongoing experience of using Inspera to manage digital exams. They shared some good practice of using videos within exams, using an example of giving health students an ultrasound recoding to watch and then asking questions about it. They are also still holding the line on proctoring, citing their testing experience of being able to easily trigger far too many false flags. Good for them.
Rounding off the morning, Adam and I from Sunderland, and Dan from Newcastle led a discussion on VLE standards. I liked the work Newcastle have done on a specimen ‘perfect’ module that meets everything to show academics how it’s done, while our ‘MOT’ service, monitoring processes, and friendly interventions with academics on how they can improve their modules, are completing the circle.
After lunch, and some unscheduled physical activity for me (don’t ask), Newcastle presented on their learning analytics system, NULA, which has been developed in collaboration with Jisc. They had very good things to say about Jisc on this one, that they’ve been very supportive and responsive on building ways of monitoring and reporting on the measures which Newcastle wanted to set.
Next, it was Dan from Newcastle again, who talked about their experience of working with students to develop their new module template which has been designed to be mobile friendly first (second photo). Something many of us claim to do, but which actually seems to be quite rare.
Finally, we were joined by Emily from Newcastle’s library team who presented on the things which keep a librarian up at night. It’s AI. It’s always AI. Specifically, every publisher is experimenting with their own generative AI tools to help people find and analyse the resources in that database. The problems are many. First, these features are coming and changing at the whim of the publisher, without warning or any ability to test and evaluate. One particularly egregious example Emily mentioned was a journal that would provide temporary access to their AI search tool to academics who had attended specific training events, or happened on specific buttons and options on their website. Secondly, Emily was deeply concerned about AI literacy and who is responsible for teaching it. It seems to be falling on interested parties in different departments in different places, when it is really something that needs direction and dedicated roles and senior staff sponsorship. Finally there are the hidden costs. While publishers are marketing these services as free improvements to their search tools, in reality they are raising subscriptions costs on the back end, at a time when the sector is struggling and almost every institution is closing courses and laying off staff.
