Here is the E-Learning Unit Newsletter for June 2015. We hope you find this month’s articles useful.
QMUL’s Turnitin policy is published – what do you need to know?
Turnitin is a text-matching tool that is widely used at QMUL to assist in detecting plagiarism. Whilst it’s clearly a useful tool for staff, it can also be used by students to help improve their academic writing and avoid unintentional plagiarism.
QMUL’s Turnitin policy and guidance document is now published and should be implemented by Schools from September 2015. The policy provides guidance on how to get the best out of the tool; how to ensure students are supported; and how to protect student information. Schools should also publish a Turnitin statement for students and a template can be found at the end of the policy, or in editable form here.
You can download a copy of the policy at: https://elearning.qmul.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Tii_policy.pdf.
See the pages at https://elearning.qmul.ac.uk/learning-applications/turnitin/ for resources on Turnitin.
If you have any questions or comments, please email elearning@qmul.ac.uk.
What’s changing in QMplus?
We were very pleased to see so many of you join us for our annual summer event on 24th June. We hope you found the event enjoyable and useful. For those of you who were unable to attend, or those of you who would like to relive the experience, we will be making the recordings available shortly along with answers to the questions which were asked and links to resources.
The following are the important dates for the QMplus upgrade:
- 20-22 July 2015 – QMplus restricted access, with intermittent outages
- 22 July 2015 – New QMplus environment released
- Week of 27 July 2015 – QMplus 2014/15 archive released – open access to staff for 4 months.
- Week of 27 July 2015 – Rollover available to administrators (after archive release)
You can find more information on the upgrade pages on the E-Learning Unit website.
QMplus Groups and Portfolios is now QMplus Hub
The upgrade to QMplus Groups and Portfolios was completed successfully on June 16th and we now have QMplus Hub. The most obvious change is the fresh new look which works well on all sorts of devices but there are a number of new features which make QMplus Hub a useful tool for a variety of purposes:
- A place to work collaboratively with colleagues on projects
- A place for students to work together
- A place to create groups to network with colleagues with shared interests
- A way to set assignments for students which involve rich media and reflective writing
If you haven’t had a look, log in to QMplus and click through to QMplus Hub. You can also find out more about the QMplus Hub upgrade on the E-learning Unit website.
Q-Review Expansion and microphone pilot at QMUL
We are in the process of expanding our Q-Review lecture capture service, installing the equipment in UG1 and LG1 in the G.O. Jones building on the Mile End campus. This brings the total number of teaching rooms which benefit from the technology to 68. The majority of venues at QMUL which have a capacity of 50 or more are now Q-Review enabled, providing students with a more consistent service to ensure that the majority of their lectures can be reviewed. To find out which other venues are Q-Review enabled, please visit the E-Learning Unit website.
These two lecture theatres, along with rooms 2.09, 3.24 and 3.25 in the Engineering building at Mile End, shall be receiving wall mounted microphones as a pilot scheme. These installations will benefit users who roam whilst teaching, but do not use radio microphones – improving the audio quality for the students in class and again for the Q-Review recordings, when students are revising.
To learn more about Q-Review and how it can benefit you and your students, please see the Q-Review pages on the E-Learning Unit website.
Upcoming staff development opportunities
We are taking a short break from our scheduled programme of workshops until after the QMplus upgrade. After this we will be running a number of sessions before teaching begins again:
- From the week beginning 27th July we will be running sessions for staff who have administrative responsibilities for QMplus covering topics such as rollover and archiving.
- From mid August we will be running sessions at Whitechapel where teaching begins earlier than the rest of QMUL
- From September 14th we will be running a number of Getting Started sessions aimed at staff preparing to start teaching and resuming our drop-in sessions for staff to come along to have specific questions answered.
These sessions will be advertised on our online course booking system, our web site and in the E-Learning Practitioners group on QMplus Hub.
