Niihka Update & Tips – April 30, 2013 | 1
Hi Instructors,
If you haven’t yet had a chance to complete the Niihka Faculty Satisfaction survey,
please do, as we would like to hear from you! Current faculty should have received
an email on April 3, offering a link to the Niihka Faculty Satisfaction Survey. Please
take a few minutes to complete the survey as your responses will help improve
Niihka and its related training & support resources to better serve you and our
students. If you can’t find the email, please contact me and I can send a new link.
In this update:
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Digital Course Evaluations Update
Course Evals and Combined Classes
Turnitin and Academic Dishonesty
Turnitin Paper View Requests
Creating an Anonymous Survey in Niihka
Digital Course Evaluations Update
Session 2 of our digital course evaluations is underway and will conclude Sunday,
May 5. Reports will be available after May 14.
The course evaluation links are available in myMiami > My Courses. If you do not
see the link, check to be sure the proper term is chosen and/or click the (refresh
now) button at the bottom of the My Courses block.
For information about downloading results and viewing reports, please see the
CollegeNET What Do You Think? Instructor manual.
As always, please encourage your students to complete all of their course
evaluations! Research shows that requests from faculty and information about the
importance of course evaluations are the most powerful ways to increase response
rates.
Niihka Update & Tips – April 30, 2013 | 2
Course Evals and Combined Classes
We have received some inquiries from instructors regarding why they see a subset
of the number of students they typically interact with listed in the course evaluation
system. This is the result of instructors participating in cross-listed or combined
classes or Niihka course sites where multiple instructors team-teach to a combined
set of students.
There is an algorithm in place to evaluate classes that meet on the same day(s), at
the same time(s), in the same room and that have the same course title combined
into a single evaluation. Currently, the algorithm will evaluate classes separately on
the basis of different courses titles.
There are cases in which different courses may meet together at the same place,
time, and room with the same instructor. Currently, the algorithm will evaluate the
students separately on the basis of different courses titles.
Turnitin and Academic Dishonesty
There was discussion a few weeks ago during a very useful seminar on Academic
Dishonesty in which it was mentioned that students may attempt to thwart Turnitin
originality checks by surrounding paragraphs with quotation marks, then making
the font color of the quotation marks white so that the quotes weren't obvious to the
instructor. The principle of this was that Turnitin doesn’t check quoted text.
I tested this a couple of ways using Turnitin through the original Assignments tool
and the Assignments 2 tool in Niihka. In all cases the plagiarized and quoted text
was caught. So I contacted our Turitin rep to find out more, because something
about this rang a bell. His reply is plagiarized, er, I mean copied below.
"There is the option within the Advanced Assignment Settings to Exclude matches that
are in quotation marks. So if the Instructor has set up their assignments to exclude
matches within quotations, the scenario you mentioned could work for the student.
The default setting though does not exclude matches within quotations, so the
instructor would have to override the default setting when they set up individual
assignments. It's probably a good idea to make Instructors aware that if they set up
assignments to exclude matches within quotations there is a potential way for students
to get around that setting."
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The advanced options mentioned above are only available if the instructor visits the
Turnitin.com web site. But these can be enabled after an assignment is created in
Niihka by visiting the class in Turnitin.com. The exclude quoted text setting is
disabled by default.
You may notice in the screen shot above that there are a couple of other settings
available such as excluding bibliographic material and small matches. In the screen
shot below you can see that for small matches, the instructor has the ability to set
the number or words or the percentage he or she considers to be a "small match."
Again, I would like to emphasize that for now, these advanced options are only
available if you logon to Turnitin.com. These options cannot be set from within the
Niihka Turnitin integration using the original Assignments tool or Assignments 2.
Turnitin Paper View Requests
From time to time you may receive a request for paper from an instructor at Miami
or another school. The message typically has the subject “Turnitin Paper View
Request” and contains text similar to that pasted below:
“Dear niihka miami,
Turnitin is forwarding this request on behalf of Joe Schmoe, an instructor at Faber
College. This instructor requests your permission to view the paper, "Air Speed
Velocity of an Unladen Swallow.docx", submitted to your class at Miami University of
Ohio on April 1, 2013. This instructor has found a 71% match to this paper in a
paper submitted to his or her Biology class.
If you choose to grant permission to the instructor to view the paper, simply reply to
this email. Please confirm the text of the student's paper is displayed in your reply
email. By replying to this email, you will be sending an email (including the text of
your student's paper) to the requesting instructor, Joe Schmoe.
The text of the paper previously submitted to your class is included below. Please
remove any identifying student information in the text below to respect the
privacy of your student prior to sending.
Thank you for using Turnitin,
The Turnitin Team”
Niihka Update & Tips – April 30, 2013 | 4
Note the text regarding removal of identifying information in the final sentence –
this is often overlooked. As mentioned in the introduction from Turnitin, the text of
the paper is included at the bottom of the message. When you reply, you will be
sending a message including with the text of the paper, to the instructor making the
request. So it is important that you peruse the paper’s text and remove any
information identifying the student who made the original submission. Often, the
student will include his or her name within the body of the paper originally
submitted to your class. In that case, the student’s name will show-up in the text
being forwarded to the requesting instructor. It’s usually right at the top of the
paper and is simple to remove before sending your reply. Just hit the reply button,
scroll down to the bottom of the content being forwarded and remove the student’s
name or other identifying info. If you are using Google Mail, you may need to click
the Show Trimmed Content button to display the content being forwarded.
Now you can select and remove any part of the forwarded text such as the student’s
name, name of lab partner, etc.
While Miami has no specific policy regarding the forwarding such requests, I suggest
letting common sense be your guide. Personally, I have always engaged in the
practice of forwarding the paper after removing any identifying information.
Participating in this practice makes sense in the interest of keeping academic
dishonesty in check here and at other institutions.
Creating an Anonymous Survey in Niihka
You know you can create tests, quizzes and exams with Niihka’s Test & Quizzes tool,
but did you know that you have the ability to create anonymous surveys as well?
This is easily done using the Assessment Builder or my personal favorite, the Text
Markup tool.
Using the Assessment Builder
Enter a name for your survey, choose the Survey test type (optional), then click the
Create button.
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The assessment builder will open prompting you to add questions. Choose Survey
from the Add Question drop-down menu.
When adding questions, choose the scale that best matches the question. For
example, the one chosen below will display the typical Likert five-item scale
Strongly Disagree -> Strongly Agree.
When finished adding questions, publish your survey using the following settings:
Assessment released to “anonymous users…”
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Only “one submission allowed…”
“Anonymous grading only,” grade book options set to “none.” These last two options
will be the default settings when the survey is set to anonymous grading.
When you’re ready to publish the survey press Save Settings and Publish…
You’ll be presented with a dialog box like the one below. At this point you choose
whether to notify students via Niihka notification email or some other means, in
which case you’ll choose “without notification.”
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Notice that the survey’s URL is highlighted in the dialog box above. You’ll want to
select and copy this URL if you plan to notify students through Miami (Google)
email, paste it into an assignment, or make it available on a web page.
If you forgot to copy the URL in the step above, you can always go back and find it
again by choosing Settings for the survey in question, then clicking the disclosure
triangle next to “Assessment Released To.”
Copy the URL and paste it into a Google email, etc. Sending the URL through Niihka
notification or Google mail, allows the survey to be taken without first having to
login to Niihka, which may help allay fears that the survey isn’t really anonymous.
However, please keep in mind that ANYONE with the link can complete the survey.
Using Text Markup
I mentioned at the top of this article that I prefer the text markup feature to the
assessment builder for creating surveys. This is because survey questions typically
repeat the same response set from question to question so it’s a matter of simply
pasting in a common set of responses. Also, with text markup, you have the
flexibility of adding choices to the scale or creating your own scale. Have you ever
received a survey question that simply wasn’t applicable but there was no
appropriate option? That kind of thing has always been a pet peeve of mine. Imagine
the question: “The instructor was very helpful when you had questions about the
homework.” Maybe the student never approached the instructor with a question
about homework. In such cases, it’s usefule to be able to add the N/A response.
Follow the instructions below for using text markup.
The first step is similar to using the assessment builder: naming your survey but,
this time choose “Create using markup text” and click the Create button. No need to
select the assessment type option.
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The next screen presents you with a text box in which you can paste the marked-up
text and gives you links to view samples and instructions for different question
types. You can enter questions and responses into the Questions box or paste them
in from a text editor. It’s best to use a text editor like WordPad for Windows or
TextEdit for Mac, rather than Microsoft Word. Text copied from Word may carry
hidden markup that will become apparent once the text is pasted.
For typical survey questions using a five-level Likert item (plus N/A,) the basic
layout is displayed below. Each question is numbered (optional), includes the point
value (zero for a survey question), and lists the responses along with an asterisk to
indicate which is the correct answer (any answer is correct for a survey).
<- Click the image to
download a sample
survey text file you can
use for experimentation.
Say you have a survey with a dozen questions all with the same response set; you
can copy the entire question and answer set once and paste it many times. Then just
go back and modify the question text. For open-ended questions all you need is the
question text – nothing else. The published survey will interpret this as a “short
essay” type question and provide a text box for the response. When finished, select
the entire contents of the file [Ctrl+A] Windows, [⌘+A] Mac, copy the selected text
[Ctrl+C] Windows, [⌘+C] Mac, then paste it into the Questions box [Ctrl+V]
Windows, [⌘+V] Mac, and click the Next button.
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You’ll be presented with the new survey with all the questions laid-out just as they’ll
appear in the survey. Click the Create Assessment button to create the survey.
Once the survey has been created, you may go back and edit any question or answer
set using the GUI (graphical user interface) just like you would if you had used the
assessment builder to create the survey. Once the survey has been administered,
you have all the same statistics, item analysis, and export to Excel features that are
available for other Niihka assessments.
Finally, here are some general guidelines for creating survey question:
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Questions should be simple
Questions should be specific
Focus on only one attribute per question
The answer list should be exhaustive or include "other," possibly with text
box for an open-ended response
Questions text should be neutral and not lead the respondent to a particular
answer
Be sure sensitive questions (e.g., age) are optional
Responses should be balanced between the number of positive and negative
responses
Thanks and have a great week,
Dave