On the course, I completed 6 modules and for all of them,
all our work had to be submitted via Turnitin. It never even crossed my mind
that this was ‘strange’ or ‘different’ – it was just the way that we were asked
to do things and we did it. There were several things that really stood out to
me:
1)
I could submit my work from wherever I was
working at the point that I was ready. Once complete, I just logged on to the
VLE and clicked on the ‘Assignment’ tab and then followed the step-by-step
upload process. I got a reassuring email telling me that the work had been
submitted . As a working mother, the ability to send work in from home at 1am was a real benefit.
2)
The first piece of work I got back was a bit of
a surprise. As I logged on to check my grade, what I found was that the essay
had been annotated all the way through with bright comments, suggestions and
references to follow up. I felt like the tutor had taken a lot of care to check
my work thoroughly and I was genuinely interested in her comments. At the end of
the assignment was an audio comment. “Hello Ros, thank you so much for all your
hard work in this essay….”it began. I was ‘gobsmacked’! I had a really personal
comment with a warm tone of voice and a summary of the main points that were
good and what needed addressing in my assignment. Working at a distance and
feeling ‘remote’ occasionally, this was a real bonus.
3)
In later pieces of work, as they became more
complex, we had the option to ‘pre-submit’. This was the chance to send in a
draft of our work to get comments about the direction and what we needed to do
to meet the criteria for the assignment. It prevented students from going off on the wrong tangent and provided a basis for any discussion with the tutor.
4)
On most of our assignments, we had the chance to
submit work which was ‘multimedia-based’. I did this in the form of videos,
blog posts, a website and PowerPoint presentations. In order for these to be
part of our assignment, I placed them on the web (or cloud) and linked to them
from my assignment. At the time, you could only load Word documents into
Turnitin (and that has now changed), but I was still able to submit multimedia
work. I really valued the chance to illustrate my ‘essay’ work with more
creative evidence and variety in the presentation of my work.
5) One thing that is interesting for me to note now is that I never
looked at the ‘Originality Report’ which detects matching text. Having looked
back, I can see that it was made available to me, but there was nothing that
needed investigating in it and the tutor never raised it with me, so I hadn’t
looked at it at all. If it had been made explicit that we should view it, then
I would have done so. In my case, I had several years of writing experience and
was already familiar with academic referencing, so developing my writing was
not mentioned. I was almost surprised to discover it as a feature when I
started planning for training sessions in my new job!
So, in summary, as a student, the main benefits for me were
convenience, enhanced contact with my tutor, the chance to receive formative
feedback and personalised comments- both written and oral.
