Case study: Formative teaching assignments: Moving to electronic submission and marking in Chemistry

Department of Chemistry
Andy Parsons

Andy Parsons provides a summary of a project to standardise approaches to formative assignment submission and feedback for tasks linked to undergraduate workshops and tutorials in the Department of Chemistry.

Online submission and feedback was introduced using the Ultra assignment tool. This aimed to streamline the assessment process, improve consistency, and enhance the accessibility of feedback for both students and staff, whilst minimising any impact on efficiency, marking times, and feedback quality.

To support the project, guidance was provided for students within their VLE sites on how to prepare their files for submission, how to submit, and how to access feedback. Staff were similarly provided with guidance on how to access submissions and use the different marking tools available.

Andy indicated that there are ongoing challenges with students sometimes not following guidelines and submitting multiple files or files with incorrect orientation. Staff also had to contend with limited options to include mathematical content within feedback comments, and some staff experienced technical difficulties with some of the marking tools on their devices. However, he reported that the project had had positive outcomes overall, stimulating a high level of engagement from staff and students. It has allowed for easier engagement monitoring, and also allowed for good feedback practices to be shared much more easily amongst staff.

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Transcript

Thanks for the opportunity to talk about, uh, what's been a big project in chemistry. Um, affects all members of staff who are involved in teaching, essentially all of our students. And, uh, yeah, it's been a big project. And I would like, first of all, thank the VLE team for all their help and support, particularly Lou, who has helped design these three new VLE sites that were set up over the summer. So this project is about taking our formative teaching online, moving to electronic submission and marking.

Just tell you a little bit about chemistry. We divide up our undergraduate students into what we call chemistry teaching colleges. Um, and there are up to 25 students in each of these colleges. So this is a way of taking a large group of students and divide them up into smaller families. And this then allows us to organise our small group teaching, which are tutorials and workshops and these tutorials and workshops will follow a lecture course.

So after a lecture course finishes, the students are required to attend either a tutorial or a workshop, uh, A workshop is where all 20 or 25 of the students from the same teaching college come together for that session to go through some work and problems associated with that lecture course. And a tutorial will be a session with a member of staff, where up to five students come together from the same teaching college. In fact, those five students will typically be the same five students throughout the year, and the idea being that the students in their teaching college will see themselves frequently. They'll get to know each other, and it's a way of developing, if you like, peer groups and friendships, etcetera, etcetera.

So for tutorials in particular, we require students to submit some answers to problems beforehand and to get some formative feedback from staff before the one hour tutorial session. So previously on the VLE, We've always housed our tutorial and workshop assignments so students could see those. And the last couple of years we've also released outline answers to those assignments. And those are released right at the end of the semester. Well, when the teaching in the semester finishes. So that's what we've been doing over the last couple of years or so on the VLE.

But this year, for the first time, we've actually gone with a consistent way in which students can submit their work for these assignments for staff to mark it and return it. And as Rob says, we're going to be using the assignment tool to do that. Just before I get into that, I just want to reflect, I guess, um, what some of my colleagues were saying about pros and cons of doing this before we actually, uh, followed this up.

In terms of cons. Um, quite a few of my colleagues were worried about how time consuming it takes to make work online. And there's been some research studies, um, that have shown that is indeed the case. And as a consequence of that, there was a bit of a concern about the reduction, maybe, in the quality of the student feedback that we would be giving, particularly with regard to some of the online tools, um, staff using different IT and having different experiences was something we were concerned about. And also we need students to follow the guidelines and I'll come back to that later.

There are a number of positives with this, particularly that we have consistency. So in previous years, um, for one week, students may be submitting their work electronically. For another week, they may be handing in, um, handwritten work to another tutor. And so this is very, very consistent. And also from a students perspective, all of the feedback now for all of their assignments land up in the same place. So they can easily see their feedback.For staff, I think there is the benefit of being able to access the work wherever you are. When you've got your PC in front of you. In the past staff would have had to go to that pigeonholes to collect any handwritten work, for example.

You may ask, why did we go for assignment tool? Um, well, we were familiar with using Turnitin for our summative assessments like research project reports and things. So it was good for staff and students, Um, because the assignment tool is similar to Turnitin, it was fully supported by the VLE team, and that was important to me because it meant I had the support of colleagues like Lou to help me. It's good for formative assignments and ultimately this was the tool, if you like that our VLE team recommended.

So one thing we did at the beginning, and we've been constantly doing this over the last few weeks, and that's updating our guidance for staff and students. And we've getting staff feedback on board to amend these almost week by week, really. And we spent a fair bit of time putting information on the VLE sites to help students and, our staff find where the work is to be able to mark it using the tools and return it. So on every VLE site, we have this staff information section at the top, which includes things like tutors' guides, there's a screencast and there's also some documentation with some guidance there for staff. We direct them where to find the work. So looking at gradebook on the VLE site, then looking at marks.

And for us the filters is really important because this is a way in which we can delve down into the college teaching group that we're looking to mark. So as a tutor, you will only mark one teaching group per week. And on the right here you can see some examples of filters. There are more than these. But if I'm marking Avogadro's students for example then I'm going to click on those. And I know there are 20 in that group. And that means that I can just see the list of the 20 students I'm going to mark. So the filters has worked really, really well.

In terms of the tools themselves, just to give you a quick overview, um, there are four key things that we're using: There's the drawing tool, which is where you actually write directly on the piece of work Very easy for ticks and crosses. It is more challenging for text, requires some skill if you're using a tablet and pen. The text box, which is this one here, is very good for just writing directly on the work. The comments tool, which is where you click specifically to an area maybe of the work, and you get a bubble above that. And that's very good for making specific points. Um, and then at the top right here we have the overall feedback section here again where you can type in some text, give students some overall comments, you can maybe add an audio or indeed video feedback. We have not done that thus far in chemistry. Or you could paste a document in there.

So how has it been going? Um, the first thing I would say is one real positive from this has been that now, as staff, we can see how each other are marking the work and this is a real, real positive because of course we can now start to learn from each other, think about good practice. In the past, someone would have been annotating maybe a handwritten piece of work on a piece of paper, submitting it back to the student. We don't get to see it, but now we can collate all the information, and that's helping us going forward to develop good practice.

In terms of, um, student submissions and staff returning work, it's been incredibly successful. We do monitor this. The reason why we monitor student submissions and returns is because this is the key way in which we monitor student engagement. So our student experience team are looking at this and it's gone very, very smoothly in terms of submissions and returns. And looking at the work that students, um, that staff sorry, have submitted back. Um, the tutors are using a whole range of different tools. The most common have been the comment boxes. And as I mentioned earlier, writing ticks and crosses.

As with most things in life, it's not gone plain sailing. There has been some issues. Um, the three key issues are as follows. The first one has being students not following guidance. So we've been very strict time and time again in requiring students to upload just one file, a PDF, in the correct orientation. We're finding even now, after a number of weeks of writing this, that some students are submitting multiple files in different formats, uh, sometimes the work is orientated horizontally rather than vertically. And unfortunately, in the assignment tool you cannot flip it round as a marker. Um, so that's been a bit of an issue.

Um, a key issue for some members of staff have been actually writing on the scripts themselves using electronic, um, tools like tablets. There's been a bit of a delay. Um, I think this is called smoothing. I think, um, this is very inconsistent. And you can see why schools and industry go with a computer, uh, type everyone having the same issues. Um, what we've seen here is that most members of staff have been fine to write on a particular script using a particular tablet and pen. Another member of staff using different software, using maybe working from home, different internet speeds have had some problems. So this has been very hit and miss. And it's been very frustrating actually, because we've not been able to get to the bottom of some of these issues that have affected just a small number of staff.

And then the last query relates to particularly with regards to mathematical annotations, um, you're not able to put in mathematical symbols for easily subscripts and superscripts as well has been a problem, because that's not possible with the text boxes.

But overall it's been a big job, it's been a big effort, and we're still learning as we go along. Um, but I would say it's gone much more smoothly than I had thought of. And we are learning, as I said earlier, about good practice. So that's it for. For me, Rob, in terms of an overview of what we've been doing.