TEU Update March 13 2025

Nominations for the DCU President’s Awards for Excellence in Teaching will close tomorrow -Friday March 14th. This is your final chance to nominate any colleagues who you feel should be recognised for excellence, innovation and commitment in their practice. Please note that there are a number of nomination categories, including one for teaching support staff, so don’t miss your opportunity to contribute to this celebration of teaching and learning at DCU.

In Spring 2025, the TEU will be facilitating a UDL Badge course locally for DCU staff. There will be a combination of short learning modules available via Loop, weekly peer meetings (via Zoom), and at the end of the course, you will submit a proposal for the redesign of a learning activity. Participants who complete the course will be awarded a digital badge recognized by the National Forum for the Enhancement of Teaching and Learning.

For more info on the content of the UDL badge course, see this page. The course will run from mid-March to late May. Register your interest here.

Weds 19 March 1:00pm-1:45pm

The Loop Team is piloting an experimental quiz question generator that leverages an AI technology to create quiz questions in Loop based on simple prompts from the lecturer. This technology can both aid in the generation of quality quiz questions as well as streamline the process of populating quizzes in Loop, thus saving the lecturer the time of manual question creation. You can see an overview of how this simple-to-use tool works in this document. We will be holding an online orientation session for lecturers interested in experimenting with the tool on Wednesday 19th March from 1pm-1:45pm.

Registration is essential. This session will be recorded and circulated afterwards.

Focus on assessment and feedback

Many colleagues will be busy grading student work at present. Although most of you would be familiar with the Loop Assignment tool to collect submissions from students, did you know it also has a host of features for managing, grading and giving feedback on submissions?

Grading online with Loop offers many benefits:

Provides a single place for students to retrieve their coursework grades
Offers consistency in how students access and interpret their coursework grades and feedback
Grading data is contained securely in Loop only, and backed up
External examiners can be given access to review assignments and grades online
Reports and analytics allow for lecturers to get insight into assessment trends
Feedback can take the form of text, video or audio (or all three!)

There are several grading methods available to you within the Loop assignment, such as:

Rubrics: Pre-defined rubrics can contain rich feedback for students and make it quick and easy to grade students’ work. A student’s final grade for their submission is automatically calculated by the rubric. Learn more about Loop Rubrics.
Ranged Rubrics: This new type of grading method introduced in 2024 gives more flexibility to an assessor, allowing you to select a specific mark to give a student within a criterion, and to differentiate between students in the same band. If you previously used the “Simple Feedback Rubric”, we recommend you switch to this instead. Learn more about Ranged Rubrics.
Marking Guide: Akin to an electronic feedback form, where certain criteria are set for an assignment, a score is attributable to each one, and feedback can be composed for the student. The Marking Guide therefore allows for consistency and structure in grading students’ submissions, as well as flexibility in what scores to award and what feedback to give. The Marking Guide also supports ‘Frequently-used Comments’, which can be inserted into students’ feedback and help speed up the process. Learn more about using Marking Guides.

Go, go - Loop Gradebook & Grades Transfer!

Wednesday 16 April, 12:00

Online via Zoom

Giving you advance notice of this session, which is scheduled for Week 13, after teaching concludes. This session is aimed at DCU module co-ordinators/lecturers and will show them how to set up their Loop Gradebook to ensure the correct grade visibility, weighting, and overall calculation of student coursework grades. It will also demonstrate the Grades Transfer process to transfer student's Loop grades as their coursework total to the student information system, Banner.

Registration is essential. Session will be recorded and circulated afterwards.

The ‘Conversations on Academic Integrity Drop In Sessions' is running every Wednesday from 12pm-1pm. The sessions will provide an opportunity for staff to discuss academic integrity in their planning for teaching, learning and assessment with our Academic Integrity Officer. Topics can include anything related to Academic Integrity or GenAI and its impact on Academic Integrity. These conversations may be particularly helpful for Programme Chairs but are open to all staff. You can also get in touch before the session by contacting samantha.xu@dcu.ie. You can drop in via this Zoom link.

If you require assistance or guidance with teaching and learning or Loop related matters, avail of the below methods.

Support for technical issues
For Loop technical queries, go to help.dcu.ie. You can also attend one of our regular online Loop drop in clinics, details in the TEU calendar. The drop in clinics are particularly useful for more complex queries. The Loop Staff Support Page also provides a comprehensive range of resources on Loop and Zoom. For new users, the enrolment key for this page is ‘staff’.

Advice on using technology for Teaching and Learning
If you are looking for advice on developing your teaching practice, including but not limited to the application of technology, please contact the TEU team teaching.enhancement@dcu.ie. We will endeavour to respond to you as soon as possible.

Consultancy request form
Interested in requesting a workshop or more extended consultation on a specific topic? Use this consultancy request form.

TEU mailing list
Going forward, the TEU newsletter and other updates will be issued to the academic staff mail group. Anyone else who wishes to receive our communications, please follow this link and click “Join Group” to be added to our mailing list. This is particularly important if you wish to receive updates on Loop related communications; professional development opportunities such as Advance HE supported journey, etc.