If you have been following the news lately, you have heard a lot about generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) programs like ChatGPT. The advancements in AI writing technology have created a sense of unease among educators, who fear that students may use AI writing tools to plagiarize their work.
Last week Turnitin announced the launch of AI writing detection capabilities in Turnitin Feedback Studio. Turnitin stated that their technology is capable of identifying both AI-generated and AI-assisted writing, including ChatGPT.
An AI writing indicator has been added to Turnitin Feedback Studio. This indicator shows possible AI-generated content. Students will not be able to see the AI writing detection indicator.
AI writing detection indicatorExample of AI Writing Detection report
If you intend to use the Turnitin AI Writing Detector, it is important that you understand the results may NOT be reliable.
Tools that use artificial intelligence are developing rapidly. False positives are not just a possibility, but an inevitability. Consequently, Turnitin’s AI Writing Detector tool cannot be fairly used as a way to assess whether a student’s work may have been written by an AI tool. We strongly recommend that you use this functionality as a guideline, not a grading metric. The results should not be used as the sole basis for adverse actions against a student. Treat any flags the tool may raise as a reason to review the student’s work further.
Bart Everson and Elizabeth Yost Hammer led an "AI²: Artificial Intelligence and Academic Integrity" workshop recently. ICYMI, you can find the workshop recording and resources referenced in the workshop on our wiki.
Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.
Image credit: image by Alexandra_Koch from Pixabay
No fooling: If it's April, it must be time for the Bike Easy Challenge!
I'm joining the Bike Easy Challenge to get more Xavierites riding bikes in New Orleans. Riding a bike can make you happier, healthier, and — yes — even wealthier. That's what I call professional development!
Did you know that New Orleans ranks #7 (among cities with over a quarter-million residents) for the percentage of people who bike to work?
And yet we could certainly do better by our bike riders, our transit riders, and our pedestrians. As I've argued elsewhere, safe transport is an issue of social justice and aligned with Xavier's mission.
Plus there are awesome prizes for riding and encouraging others throughout the month of April. Find out more and register at lovetoride.net/bikeeasy
It only takes a minute to register. It doesn't matter if you ride every day, or if you haven't been on a bike in years. Everyone is invited — and be sure to join the Xavier team!
Holler at me if you need any technical assistance or have any questions.
The World-Wide Teach-In is underway now, and we're doing our part here at Xavier University of Louisiana. A number of professors already have or soon will MakeClimateAClass.
Rev. Gregory Manning spoke to Dr. Mark Gstohl's Christian Faith class, and wow! — what a powerful message. See pic below.
I am writing this blog post as a follow up to my Brightspace Tip #277: Grade Book - Bonus Points blog post. I've received a few questions about bonus items in a weighted grading system. This blog post addresses how bonus items work in a weighted Grade Book.
Bonus refers to optional activities. Students are NOT penalized for skipping the activity. Points earned for Bonus activities will improve the student’s grade. Checking the Bonus option means that any points earned will be added onto the Final Calculated Grade. Bonus items appear in the Grade Book with a Star next to them.
Bonus grade items are not included in the maximum points for a category or final grade. They are added on top of the calculated grade. The Can Exceed option must be selected in order for users' grades to exceed the maximum points specified.
The Can Exceed and Bonus options can both be selected for a grade item.
If you allow an item to exceed 100% or include Bonus items, but do not check the box "Can Exceed" in the category and/or “Final Calculated Grade” settings, then extra credit will count but it will be limited to no more than 100% for the category or “Final Calculated Grade.”
If you create a “Bonus” item with no category, limit its weight to the most you wish to add to the final course percentage. For example, if you do not want to add more than 3% to any given final grade, limit the Bonus item’s weight to 3%. The bonus points can be any number of points because the weight makes the difference in the overall calculation.
Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.
D2L (the company that owns Brightspace) uses Continuous Delivery to update our Brightspace system. The Continuous Delivery model gives us regular monthly updates allowing for incremental and easily integrated changes with no downtime required for our Brightspace system.
Our Continuous Delivery update occurs on the 4th Thursday of each month. D2L provides release notes to help users stay up-to-date with the changes.
Here are a few updates in the March 2023/20.23.3 release that were added to our system this month:
1) Awards – Share achievements to LinkedIn profiles
Learners can now share achievements from the Awards tool directly to their LinkedIn profiles.
This feature simplifies showcasing awards in LinkedIn profiles. Awards can now be shared directly from Brightspace without using a third-party tool or creating a link to the award first.
To share an award to their LinkedIn profiles, learners can navigate to the My Awards page, select the desired award, click Share, and then click the new Share to LinkedIn button.
Shared awards appear in the Licenses & Certifications section of learners' LinkedIn profiles.
Allow users to share awards
Share award to LinkedIn
Previously, awards could be shared to LinkedIn by first sharing the award to Badgr or creating a public link to the award (available as of November 2022) and then copying the link to LinkedIn.
This feature implements PIE item D8491 (Share Badges Directly to LinkedIn).
2) Calendar – Prevent duplicate calendar events on copy/import to reduce performance issues
With this release, calendar events are checked to see if they are duplicates when performing a course copy or import. When either action is performed, Brightspace only copies the following:
Calendar events that have an association, such as to an activity that is being copied into the course offering.
A single unique Calendar event that is manually created.
When a user manually creates multiple calendar items, Brightspace compares the following fields when checking for duplicates:
Title
Description
Start Date (or Start Day for All Day Events)
End Date (or End Day for All Day Events)
If its an All Day Event
Repeat Every (e.g.: every day, every second month)
Repeat On (day of week, only valid for Weekly events)
Repeat Until Date
Repeat Type (None, Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Annually)
Event Visibility
Location
Group associations
This feature only applies when performing a copy into a course offering and when importing course packages. It does not check if existing events are duplicates.
Previously, manually created or imported calendar events were not checked for duplication, creating duplicate calendar items.
3) Media Library – Adapt the player to match available space or video resolution while using ISF Plugin
The ISF player insert is now responsive and adapts to match screen size. When using Insert Stuff in Brightspace Editor to insert a video, the video preview screen is updated to show a responsive player and will now scale to the available maximum width. Height and aspect ratio are still respected. Previously, the player was too small, especially for users with smaller devices. In addition, users had to specify a size to embed the player via ISF.
The layout slider will be removed as the responsive nature of this update makes it redundant. Existing videos that were added to Brightspace Editor before the 20.23.3 release will remain statically sized.
For customers using the sample HTML v3.0 Templates, the Video Lecture page, or who are managing any Learning Creative Services or third-party HTML templates and styles: please be aware that after the 20.23.03 update, videos hosted in the Brightspace Media Library are responsive automatically without having to insert videos into the video wrapper sections. Customers can now insert Brightspace Media Library videos where needed into any template as there is no longer a need to insert into a video wrapper section to make the video responsive. Customers wishing to continue using the video wrapper section with Brightspace Media Library videos can explore how to update their versions of the Sample HTML v3.0 CSS by visiting HTML Template (Version 3.0) - Brightspace.
4) User Management and Settings – Easily change language preferences using the User Menu
A new language selector is available in the user menu to easily change the language setting to the user’s preferred language. Previously, a user had to navigate to Account Settings or use a custom installed widget with a complex workflow. Users can continue to access language and locale within the Account Settings page; this update provides an option that you can more easily access.
Note: Only languages that are enabled by your organization are available for selection.
This feature implements the following PIE items:
D8920 (Language toggle feature)
D7508 (Preferred Language Selector)
The User Settings menu with the current language highlighted.
Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.
Social media ain’t what it used to be. Actually, it never was: the fix was in from the beginning. The giant platforms of today were founded with the explicit purpose of making a profit at our expense. It doesn’t have to be this way. In this workshop, we take a look at a social media platform built on an entirely different model, with an entirely different premise. We'll also take a glance at the implications and opportunities for teaching, scholarship, and higher education in general.
Thanks to those who were able to attend our workshop on "Mastodon and Beyond: Our Federated Future." In case you missed it, or if you just want a refresher, we recorded a video for you. You can find this and a few other curated resources on the CAT+FD wiki.
Note that Mastodon is developing rapidly, so this video will probably be very dated very soon, but we hope it gives you a quick picture of where things stand at the current moment.
Do you want your students to take a quiz or test online? Do you have a test that you normally administer on paper and you don’t want to retype all the questions into Brightspace? The Quiz Question Converter is a tool, from the Brightspace Community, that you can use to add a bank of questions to the Quiz Question Library.
The Quiz Question Converter will create a CSV file for import into Brightspace. Quiz questions have to be in a special format in order to be imported into Brightspace.
Example of a multiple choice question reformatted for the Quiz Question Converter.
One benefit of using the Quiz Question Converter is that you can add feedback and hints to the quiz questions you are importing into Brightspace. Therefore saving you time in importing your quiz questions along with the feedback and hints all in the same import file.
Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.
There are two ways to give extra credit in Brightspace. The first is to allow the grade item to exceed the maximum number of points for the assignment. The other option is to indicate the grade item is a “Bonus” item.
The differences between the two options are explained here:
Can Exceed means in grading an item you are able to add extra credit to the assignment, quiz, or any item in the Grade Book. You indicate this by checking the Can Exceed box.
The Can Exceed option can boost student’s score on activity making it feasible to earn more than 100%. For example, on a grade item where the maximum points is 10 and the Can Exceed option is selected, a grade of 12/10 is a perfect score with 2 extra credit points added.
When you choose Can Exceed for a grade item in the Grade Book, you should also select Can Exceed for the Category in which the grade item resides.
Bonus refers to optional activities. Students are NOT penalized for skipping the activity. Points earned for Bonus activities will improve the student’s grade. Checking the Bonus option means that any points earned will be added onto the Final Calculated Grade.
Bonus items appear in the Grade Book with a Star next to them.
Bonus grade items are not included in the maximum points for a category or final grade. They are added on top of the calculated grade. Bonus grade items cannot make users' grades exceed the maximum points specified, unless the Can Exceed option is selected.
The Can Exceed and Bonus options can both be selected for a grade item.
Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.
Thanks to those of you who attended last week's Rethinking and Improving Online Tests in Brightspace workshop. The workshop, the fourteenth in our #LEX Advanced series, helps you to build on the skills you learned in the #LearnEverywhereXULA course and challenges you to rethink and improve your tests and exams for better learning assessment.
In case you missed last week’s training session or if you attended the training session and want to recap what was covered, a copy of the workshop recording and resources referenced in the workshop are available. You can find the workshop recording and other resources in support of the workshop on the CAT+FD wiki.
Additionally, if you did not get the opportunity to earn a digital badge for participating in the workshop, it's not too late to earn that badge. We have a corresponding “Online Tests” module in the #LearnEverywhereXULA (#LEX) course that you can complete to earn a digital badge for this topic. The badge will count towards your #LEX Advanced certification.
Pi (π) Day is celebrated on March 14th (3.14). Did you know the Brightspace Community has a PIE? Yes, there is a PIE (Product Idea Exchange) in the Brightspace Community. The PIE is a system that allows users of Brightspace to share their suggestions on how to make Brightspace better. I invite you to take a few minutes to explore the Brightspace Product Idea Exchange (PIE).
We’ve put together this collection of PIE ideas you can consider upvoting so that we can add our voice to the community to make the Brightspace experience better. You can also search the PIE for ideas to upvote or submit your own idea to the PIE. Let us know if you submit your own idea to the PIE so that we can upvote it. Here is a resource on navigating the PIE, just in case you need it.
Note: Are you doing something innovative in Brightspace or perhaps you've discovered a handy tip? Share how you are using Brightspace in your teaching and learning in The Orange Room.
