Introduction
Many teachers use Microsoft Office documents in their classrooms every day. Now, when teachers add a Microsoft Office resource (Word, Excel or PowerPoint) in assignments they can choose to make a copy for each student, follow-up in-progress work and provide just-in-time feedback directly in the browser. You don’t even need a Microsoft account.
Students can work on the assignment from inside itslearning without downloading or uploading their answer. This saves both students and teachers time, allows teachers to better scaffold the assignments, removes any need for copying or uploading assignment answers and gives teachers new ways to provide quality feedback directly in the Office productivity tools.
Office assignment templates can be used with these great tools already in itslearning:
- Plagiarism support: when this is enabled, we automatically send a copy of the submitted answer for checking
- Peer assessments and group assignments
- eAudio/Video Feedback: record feedback for students
- Quickly assess and comment on work with the All-in-One Grader.
Note: This functionality is only available when Office Online is enabled by the system administrator (Admin Tab>>Edit Global Settings>>Cloud Services>>Office Online). Refer to this page on Connecting Office Online to itslearning.
This is a staggered feature and will be made available to all itslearning users by Summer 2019.
A similar functionality is already available for Google documents when a G Suite domain is connected. Refer to this document for more information.
Step-by-step to Microsoft Office templating:
1) Assignment: Make a Copy
2) Students can access the resource directly from the assignment
3) Students work on the resource using Office Online directly in itslearning.
4) When they submit their answer, their edit permissions become view permissions. Teacher can view, edit and comment on the answer using the All-in-One grader. If the student needs to resubmit, they will get Edit permissions again.
Using a Template File in Assignments
The following video provides a full overview on using this templating feature:
Plagiarism
It is possible to enable plagiarism together with templating. A copy of the submitted file will be downloaded in the background and sent to the plagiarism service.
Note that the plagiarism percentage will likely be higher when using a template, since any text used in the template is likely to reoccur in all submissions.
Peer assessment
It is possible to enable plagiarism together with peer assessment. A copy of the submitted file will be downloaded as PDF in the background. Peers can use our document viewer to view and annotated on the file.
Adding to the Library
Assignments can be added to the library. Depending on the share scope (e.g. school vs. site vs. community), the assignment can be found by somebody outside the domain of the site that might or might not have their own Office integration.
In this case it will not be possible for students to get a copy of the file.