Welcome to the January EduExe newsletter!

The EduExe Newsletter is an initiative for all colleagues involved in education, focusing on news, updates and all things educator development and enhancement. This monthly newsletter will include relevant articles and resources according to the time of the academic year, updates on strategic projects, reminders of key deadlines (i.e. for module amendments) and much more! 

This issue we have articles and resources on:

• Module amendment deadline for 24/25
• Reminder - National Student Survey 2024
• Marking practices in Higher Education
• Enhancement HUB is now closed
• What's your marking personality - hawk or dove?
• 10 top tips for marking this exam period!
• Generative AI and academic misconduct dos and donts
• Feedback festival
• Maths and stats peer assisted learning scheme recruitment
• Transformative Education Seminar Series
• Education Incubator Lunchtime Talk
• On EduExe socials this month
• Christmas Linkee Challenge - the answer!
• Taskmaster Challenge

Module amendment deadlines for 24/25

Please find below a summary of the module amendment guidance note for 24/25. This guidance is also available via the TQA Manual’s forms page, here

Deadlines: 

 The deadlines are as follows (Note, faculty-specific deadlines below*):

• UG 2/3/4:                   Friday 1st March 2024
• UG 1 / PGT:                Friday 26th April 2024

These are the dates by which amendments need to have been:

a) submitted via the Module Amendment Site;

b) approved by DESEs and

c) progressed to the PDQE Team (formley QST) for review/publication

*HASS deadlines:

• UG 2/3/4: Wednesday 28^th February 2024
• UG 1/PGT: Wednesday 17^th April 2024

*Business School deadlines:

• New modules / suspensions of existing modules: Monday 22nd January 2024
• Amendments to UG 2 & Finalist modules: Monday 22nd January 2024
• Amendments to UG 1 & PGT modules: Friday 12th April 2024

Post-deadlines administrative downtime: 

There is a new addition to the process, there will be two periods of two weeks of ‘downtime’ to the module amendment site to allow PDQE and the Hubs to complete all required administrative tasks:

• Monday 4th March 2023 – Friday 15th March 2023 
• Monday 29th April 2023 – Friday 10th May 2023

If any urgent late amendments are needed during these times, staff are advised to contact the PDQE team directly.

Faculty of Environment, Science and Economy: ese-quality@exeter.ac.uk

Faculty of Health and Life Sciences: hls-quality@exeter.ac.uk

Faculty of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences: hass-quality@exeter.ac.uk

Late amendments: 

As per the guidance, ‘a judgement must be made by the relevant DESE(s) or APVCE (as agreed by Faculty)’ as to whether late amendments are to be permitted. Late module amendments should only be made where deemed to be absolutely essential.

Reminder - National Student Survey 2024

The University will launch the National Student Survey (NSS) 2024 on Monday 15 January with an email from the Vice-Chancellor. The NSS is open to all finalist undergraduates to complete until Tuesday 30 April. Eligible students can choose to enter a prize draw, with a first prize of £500 and 10x £50 prizes. £1 will also be donated to charity for every completed survey, which led to £4,351 being donated last year.

There will be publicity and promotional stands across the University, however we welcome colleagues promoting it to their students. If you do promote it, you must understand what you can and can’t say – what constitutes inappropriate influence. There is a recording of a Teams presentation which outlines what you can and can't do and you can watch that here. The inappropriate influence guidance is on the website within the promotion section. Please note, this information is for staff only. If you run a meeting where completion rates are discussed, you must email studentcomms@exeter.ac.uk stating why it was discussed, when and who attended.

Have a question about promoting the NSS? Slides for lectures will be on the website soon and/or get in touch with the Student Communications team at studentcomms@exeter.ac.uk

If you can delay sending emails to final year undergraduates on Monday 15 January that would be appreciated.

Enhancement HUB is now closed

After playing a pivotal role during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Enhancement Hub is now closed and is no longer available to staff. All the content has been archived and/or copied across to the Education Toolkit, including the Academic Personal Tutoring resources.

Please update your links accordingly!

Marking practices in Higher Education

To judge how good something is a marker needs to be able to compare it with something, in other words to judge it against a standard. Criterion-referenced assessment judges how well a student has performed against a pre-determined set of descriptive criteria. These criteria are tightly aligned to the learning outcomes for the module and seek to help a marker assess to what extent a learner has achieved them. 

A minority of assessments in University are judged against simple Pass / Fail criteria, i.e. that the students have either met or failed to meet the standard expected. Such an approach best suits professional exams in which a set of professional competencies are tested – typical say in Nursing clinical practice – a student is judged to be professionally competent or not. 

However, the majority of modules are judged against a graded set of criteria in which students can demonstrate different levels of achievement. In this case the criteria seek to describe a range of standards and/or qualities that correlate with the grade boundaries. In essence they describe what an excellent, a very good, a good, a satisfactory and an unsatisfactory performance look like. 

What's your marking personality - hawk or dove?

All markers are required to use marking criteria and apply them consistently to all the work they grade. However, particularly in divergent assessments with no set ‘right answer’, there is room for different markers to judge either more severely or more generously using the criteria. It’s therefore important for us all to consider how we approach marking to ensure that we’re being neither too strict (like a hawk) nor too kind (like a dove). 

Here are three questions to consider when you’re marking:

1. What’s the baseline that I start from when marking, and how does this affect my approach? Do I assume that my students start at 100% and ‘lose marks’ for errors, or assume that they start from 0% and ‘win marks’ for their responses? 
2. Am I looking to ‘reward’ or to ‘punish’ my students? Am I focusing solely on finding and highlighting students’ mistakes, or am I seeking out opportunities to identify and reward positives?
3. How does my approach align with that of my colleagues? Can I engage in pre-marking calibration or benchmarking, to check my interpretation of the criteria and standardise my approach?  

It is important to develop self-awareness as a marker, and to remember that sometimes we may need to take a step back and recalibrate our approaches in order to ensure consistent, reliable, and fair marking for our students.

1. Follow Marking Guidelines: Adhere to any provided marking guidance, regularly referring back to it during the marking process.

2. Use Assessment Criteria: Keep the assessment criteria and marking scheme handy for consistent grading.

3. Seek Clarification: If unsure, ask for more guidance from the module leader.

4. Provide Constructive Feedback: Ensure feedback is related to learning and improvement.

5. Maintain Freshness: Take regular breaks to stay alert and unbiased.

6. Be Self-Aware: Recognize and control personal biases and preferences.

7. Check Consistency: Re-evaluate a sample of marked work for grading consistency.

8. Set Time Budgets: Manage time effectively and compare with peers to gauge efficiency.

9. Encourage Peer Review: Swap scripts with peers to benchmark standards and approaches.

10. Use criterion referenced assessment: Judge how well a student has performed against the assessment criteria, rather than marking 'on a bell curve'.

Feedback festival

The Feedback Festival will take place in the w/c 26th February. The festival complements the 5 days of feedback communications that went out to staff in w/c 11th December, and focuses on student facing resources and activities to promote feedback literacy and engagement with feedback. It is also an opportunity to extend the work of the NSS Assessment and Feedback project, and collect data on student perceptions of feedback. The festival supports the work and communications around the NSS and is being led by the Educator Development team in collaboration with Student Voice and Change and Academic Skills and delivered online and across our Streatham, St. Luke’s and Penryn campuses.

Detailed communications will be sent to staff and students from the beginning of February!

Generative AI and academic miscoduct dos and donts

As we enter the marking period, here's a reminder of our Exeter Generative AI and academic misconduct ‘do’s and don'ts':

Don’ts 

• Don’t use external AI detectors – not only are the majority of AI detectors unreliable, we do not have permission from students to run their work through external, non-GDPR compliant systems so this counts as a data breach. 
• Similarly, don’t run student work through ChatGPT or other generative AIs to see if it was AI generated. ChatGPT does NOT have access to a repository of past discussions to check against, nor can it predict whether text is likely to be AI generated. Any conversation with ChatGPT suggesting otherwise is ChatGPT lying (such as in this very public case), and it is not GDPR compliant and counts as a data breach. 
• Don’t jump to conclusions or make assumptions about student use of generative AI in assignments – a lot of the ‘how to spot cheating using ChatGPT’ guides refer to some standard features of undergraduate work. 
• Don’t be too accusatory if you suspect a student of misconduct using generative AI – we are all still learning and we need to have clear evidence of misconduct to start the academic misconduct process. 
• Don’t put comments about suspected use of generative AI in your marking or feedback. 

Do 

• Do make sure you have evidence of misconduct – rather than a gut feeling. 
• Do talk to your ACO as soon as you have concerns about student work and use of generative AI. 
• Do make sure you are aware of university guidance and discussion. 
• Do consider holding a viva is you suspect a student of misconduct using generative AI, to gather evidence – do remember this is part of the marking process (not the misconduct processes). The viva should not be used as a decision making/penalty exercise - remember it’s a fact-finding exercise. 
• Do make sure you follow university misconduct processes. 
• Do remember we are all liable to subject access requests so ensure you hold discussions in an appropriate manner. 
• Do send concerns to student cases. 
• Do remember and consider our data management and info governance. 

Maths and stats peer assisted learning scheme recruitment

The Maths and stats PAL scheme is recruiting PGR mentors. Please can you share this oppprtunity with PGRs in your department:

Are you a current postgraduate student at Exeter with a maths specialism? We have an exciting opportunity to help establish a new peer learning scheme!

We are looking for 3 postgraduate students to run our new Maths and Stats Peer-Assisted Learning Scheme for undergraduates. This is a rare and rewarding opportunity to be involved in setting up a new scheme and helping students help students.

If you are a current postgraduate student interested in this role, or want to share this with interested students, please read our SPPO role descriptor for full details and the link to apply. Find out more about the Peer Support team on our website. Please email Emma Norman (e.norman@exeter.ac.uk) with any queries. 

Transformative Education Seminar Series

We invite you to attend the eighth seminar in our Transformative Education Seminar Series titled 'International Student Experience in Higher Education.' Speakers include Mr Richard Cotterill (University of York), Dr Prithvi Perepa (University of Birmingham), and Dr Annabel Watson, Dr Sharon Strawbridge, Dr Leila Dawney (University of Exeter). Please see the poster below for more information and sign up here!

Education Incubator Lunchtime Talk

1^st February, 12.30pm-1.15pm

Register on Eventbrite

All staff and students are warmly invited to join our online Lunch Time Talk where our new Education Incubator Fellows will share their exciting projects on pedagogical innovation at the University.

On EduExe socials this month

EduExe continues to grow our social media presence, sharing updates, best practice and discussing current issues in Higher Education. This month we shared blog posts on:

• ‘Melanin Matters’ - A student-led skin diversity project - Natasha Syed

If you are interested in contributing a case study of your practice to the EduExe blog, please contact us on eduexe@exeter.ac.uk!

Don't forget you can follow us on LinkedIn for updates!

Christmas Linkee Challenge - The Answer

We designed a special Christmas Linkee with four questions - here are your four answers and the all important Linkee!

1. What is the new name for the Exeter Education Innovation Institute? Learning Futures Institute
2. What team supporting the delivery of the ASPIRE Framework? Educator Development
3. What is the name for the scheme where students get involved in projects to improve their university experience? Students as Change Agents (SACA)
4. What's the name of the form to approving new degree programmes? Programme Approval/Amendment Form (PAAF)

So...what's the Linkee? Learning Experiences and Innovation (LXI) all these teams and processes are based in LXI!

Taskmaster challenge!

This month's activity is in the style of a Taskmaster challenge. We are looking for colleagues to send us words beginning with E to eduexe@exeter.ac.uk - the second longest word sent to us will win an EduExe mug or lanyard!

Please note the word has to appear in the OED.

Follow us on social media or visit our website to find out more about educator development and enhancement at Exeter!