Fall 2021 term is fast approaching. We are here to help you prepare and make your fall courses more engaging in face-to-face, online, and hybrid classrooms. Here are five tools for your consideration.
Sakai Roster Tool (Duke-supported）
The Roster tool in a Sakai site turns a simple enrolled student name list into real people, with full name, pronouns, audio recorded pronunciation, email, and even profile pictures and other details. It’s wonderful to be able to call each other’s names as in their native language and match names with faces on the first day of class. Making connections early on helps to nurture an inclusive community and build social bonds in the hybrid teaching and learning mode. This is especially important to a global campus such as Duke Kunshan University.
Everyone’s information is aggregated from their own profile into the Roster tool in each course site. Please guide your students to complete their profiles before or during the first week of class via the individual’s Profile feature from the Home tab. For the technical guide, please refer to the Roster tool documentation and steps to set up a Profile.
- Instructions for Roster tool and set up Profile
Gradescope (Duke-supported）
Gradescope is a web-based assessment and feedback tool integrated with Sakai. This tool enables instructors to manage and grade various types of assessments with AI assistance. It also supports grading quickly, equitably, and flexibly while providing detailed formative feedback to students.
Gradescope has been widely used at DKU and Duke. You may read more about how it works in different courses with various assessments in the quick guide. To get started with this tool, you may refer to the Get Started page with tutorial videos.
Here is a side note to invite faculty to share their experience of using Gradescope, especially during and post pandemic teaching. Funded by an external grant, this year we initiated a research project to explore its effectiveness in the optimization of assessment design and feedback delivery. If you are willing to discuss your design of assessments or user experience, feel free to contact us directly. A small gift will be provided upon your participation.
TEAMS (Duke-supported）
Instructors and students need to communicate using instant messaging to post updates, ask a quick question, or simply check their whereabouts before meetings. Though WeChat has been used for these purposes, we recommend Microsoft TEAMS for academic-related matters and keep it separate from social media outlets. Instructors and students can exchange quick messages using text, photos, emojis, documents, and links. Chat history is saved and synced across desktop and mobile devices. Beyond chat and video conferencing, TEAMS is also integrated with Microsoft OFFICE applications for collaborative work and file sharing. Besides private and group chats, TEAMS can be linked to a class roster and creates a virtual space for Q&A, class materials, assignments, built-in video chat, and other add-on applications.
TEAMS is a Duke-supported tool and everyone at DKU has access using NetID login. Please refer to the DKU TEAMS installation instruction to get started.
- DKU TEAMS instruction: https://dukekunshan.edu.cn/en/microsoft-teams-instruction
Poll Everywhere (DKU Only)
Instructors often pose quick questions in the class to elicit a real-time response, direct attention to key topics, check pre-class preparation, or conduct a short quiz/survey after class. Similar to raising hands and doing a headcount, Poll Everywhere, a live instant polling system, can be very handy on such occasions. To keep both in-person and remote students engaged at all times, you may insert Poll Everywhere into your slide presentations and share your screen on Zoom. More instructions on creating polls can be found on the tutorials page.
PollEverywhere is a tool available to DKU faculty and staff. If you have never used Poll Everywhere before, please contact us to request an account. Once added, you will receive an invitation email to set up your account.
Turnitin Feedback Studio (DKU Only)
Turnitin Feedback Studio (TII Feedback Studio) is a similarity detection and feedback system provided to the DKU community via Sakai. It enables students, faculty, and other instructional personnel to compare their work with the world’s largest academic work database. Though commonly recognized as a plagiarism detection application, it has become more widely used in academia as a feedback system to improve academic integrity and build up students’ academic writing skills by providing structured and personalized feedback from instructors and peers.
Turnitin Feedback Studio is currently accessible to all DKU faculty and students at the course level via Sakai integration. It has been used for writing-related assignments such as essays, reflections, research papers, and lab reports, by many faculty from all three divisions and LCC since the beginning of the pilot. Please find more details in the Overview document and the Faculty Guide. Feel free to distribute the Student Guide should you choose this tool for your class.
