with the topological aspect of topological manifolds. So today we shall study paracompactness to begin with. Essentially we are more interested in the partition affinity part of paracompactness rather than all those topological conditions of locally finite open refinement and so on and so on. So we will directly prove the existence of partition affinity together with horse dwarfness, the paracompactness is equivalent to existence of partition affinity. This is a general aspect. So we will not lose anything. And if you have seen this proof in the study of your differential topology like every open subset of Rn, every subset of Rn is paracompact. The proof is much simpler here. There what you do doing is not only you will be studying paracompact but you will be studying smooth partition affinity. So proof is if not difficult it is even slightly less easier you may say than in the case of a smooth partition affinity. But what I wanted to say is proof more or less repeats the steps that you have been going through in the case of a subset of Rn is paracompact. So let us do those things, rituals here. Start with the topological manifold. The statement of this lemma is that there exists a nested sequence of open subsets Wj in X such that each Wi closure is compact, Wi closure will be contained inside Wi plus 1. Wi plus 1 closure will be contained at Wi plus 2 and so on. And X itself is the union of Wis. This itself, this lemma itself would have been totally easy in the case of Rn because you can then you take just ball centered at the origin ok ball with radius 1 ball with radius 2 and so on you are done. But suppose you want to prove this one for any open subset of Rn then whatever we are doing here is the same proof there also ok. There are many ways of doing it not just one but in this case one of the proofs which you work very nicely for topological manifolds. So I am going to prove that proof here ok. So what we are using here use a second countability ok. It follows that there is a countable family of homeomorphisms Fi from Ui to Rn where Uis are open in X and X is union of Fi inverse of open balls ok open balls. The domain of Fi is may be larger ok and the image of this one I will assume that they are larger than the single open ball of radius 1 B10 denotes the open ball of radius 1 inside Rn ok. There is always such an atlas out of which I can take a countable cover because every second countable space has a countables whenever you have an open cover it admits a countable sub cover that is lindel of property ok. Now let us have this notation B10 is what is the open ball of radius 1 at the origin. So more generally BRX is set of all Y in R is set norm of Y minus X is less than R open ball of radius R centered at X ok. So put Vi equal to Fi inverse of B10 these Vi's cover the whole of it. Uis may be larger now Vi's are Fi inverse of B10 ok. Each Vi is an open subset of it. The closure of Vi bar and then Vi bar it will be Fi inverse of B1 bar it is a closed ball ok. So that is compact. So inverse image under this homomorphism is compact ok. Homomorphism closure of the open ball B10 ok. So start with W1 equal to B1. B1 bar is compact ok. Inductively suppose we have defined Wk to satisfy the property 1 and 2 ok. Suppose you have constructed W1 W2 Wk with that property you select finitely many members of Vi that covers Wk bar because Wk bar is covered by these Vi's and Wk bar is compact therefore there are finitely many Vi's which Vi's I do not know to collect them. Let Wk plus 1 be the union of these members and Wk plus 1. These members Vi's cover Wk bar but Wk plus 1 may not be there. So put Wk plus 1 also. In other words to begin with we had V1 when we second try we will be definitely have V2 also at the K plus 1 stage we definitely have Vk plus 1 along with there may be many others Vi's which might have come. If Vk plus 1 has already come there is no need to put it extra. So there is no harm in putting it again that is all. So check that the property 3 holds namely now exceeds the union of all the Wi's.  Being a finite union of all these and each of them meaning compact the closure will be compact. So property 2 is obvious. Property 3 is because at each stage we have been careful enough to include V1, V2, Vn, V and so on. The union of Vi's is the whole of X right. Therefore property 3 also. So that is the limit ok. Having done that we will attack partition of unity. So let us go through the definition here. I have given full definition here ok. Let X be any subspace of a manifold wire. So we are going to prove that every subspace is para-compact which is very stronger result than saying that the space is para-compact ok.  Then there exists a countable family theta j of continuous real varied functions on Y with compact supports such that all these this is part of the definition of para-partition affinity ok. They are all taking values between 0 and 1 in the closed interval ok. And they are all defined on the whole of Y. The X is subspace of Y. The domain of these theta j's is the whole of Y ok. For each X in X there exists a neighborhood NX of X such that only finitely many members theta j's are non-zero on NX. So this is called locally finiteness at each point of X. So I am not claiming the local finiteness on Y. That is very important. Note this carefully ok. The third condition is for each j support of theta j into section X is contained in one of the members of U alphas. So now relating with the given covering. Otherwise there was nothing to. So theta j support of theta j intersection with that is contained inside one of the U alpha name U alpha j ok. The fourth condition is some total of theta j is one which makes its partition affinity. The third condition is support of theta j contained. This one means this partition affinity subordinate to the given covering ok. I am just recalling this one. I presume that you know paracompassiness. I presume that you know partition affinity. Because at least in part one I have done all this. Taking U equal to U alpha ok. It is an open covering right.  Instead of doing these things on X I can do it on U on the whole of and then restrict it to X. Because functions are going to be defined on the whole of Y ok. So it is enough to prove the theorem for open subsets of Y ok. So that is the simplification first thing. Therefore you may assume X itself is open environment. By previous lemma X is the increasing union of a countable family of open subsets Ki. I written one with the closure of each Ki being compact. So I am using lemma here ok. Every open subset of a manifold is a manifold. So manifold can be written like this is the previous lemma. So I can write X as a increasing union of open subsets. Each of them such that their closures are compact and contained inside the next one. Just for completion of this just for argument sake put k naught equal to empty set. This will be needed for us. You can also put k minus 1 also empty set ok. We shall first construct a family B ij double indexed ok of open subsets of X with homeomorphisms B ij to the unit ball ok dn such that if we put half B ij this is just definition notation half B ij is phi ij inverse of half the ball ok half the radius is half ok not you have not cut it laterally ok radius of this one is half of the ball psi ij inverse take that part then these half B ij's themselves cover X ok. These are open subsets at each point. So it is a covering alright and is a locally finite open refinement of u alpha. So this is what we are going to do we have not yet done it. This is we shall first construct a family ok. Locally refinement means what? Definement means what? Each B ij's contained inside u alpha one of the u alpha's. Local finite means what? This condition namely at each point there is a neighborhood nth which will intersect only finitely many members of these B ij's. So once you have done that inductively suppose B ij's have been constructed for i less than or equal to k for b1 for w1 you can always construct. Actually that is why I have put k0 equal to empty set you can start with the induction hypothesis here ok it is no problem. B ij have been constructed for i less than or equal to k so that half of them cover the kk bar up to k you have done ok. For each point X in the complement of kk inside kk plus 1 bar see kk is an open subset kk plus 1 bar is closed subset. So this complement is a closed subset of a compacted this compacted you can so you can choose a neighborhood wx contained in some member of u alpha because u alpha's cover them and not intersecting kk minus 1 bar ok. So kk contains kk minus 1 bar so I have thrown away kk itself kk minus 1 is far away and that is a closed subset there will be a distance and so on in the Euclidean space alright but you do not need all that you have to just see that this is it is a compact subset and let us say closed subset away from that right. So you can always do an open subset which is smaller than that one here which one ok. You can further assume that there is a homomorphism psi x from wx to b10 ok you can take always a smaller open subset and then declare that that open subset is homomorphic to whole days such that psi of x goes to x goes to 0 that is psi x is a coordinate chart at that point. Now psi x inverse of half ball is an open cover for this kk plus 1 minus kk for each point I have done that and this is a compact set. So I get finitely many x1, x2, xr such that this complement is contained in the union of psi x or half balls ok. This is what I am going to do in the inductive step. So if you have doubt about what where the inductive step so put k equal to 0 this is nothing but this is just first stage I am doing kk plus 1 ok. All these not intersecting etcetera is emptyly you know vacuously true that is all. So I have taken kk plus 1 bar is a compact set I have taken covering of that one that is the starting point. Logically I can should have started with k not equal to empty set and then there is no problem. So this is the inductive step. Now I will put the new family kk plus 1 comma j as psi xj inverse of these things I do not know how many of them so psi xj of v1 bar.  I am calling them as bk plus 1j. It follows that kk plus 1 bar is contained inside this family now because whatever is not covered by not covered kk those things they have been they are all here now namely this new one.  Everything is in kk is already covered by induction hypothesis. So this should be covering for kk plus 1 bar. So for each compact thing we have selected these opens of sets which are smaller than one of the members of this one namely they are what they are refinements of the original covering and now as kk range is overall these will be a covering for whole of x now because union of kk plus 1s are all kks are all is the whole of x. The only difference is in the lemma we have w say here they are kis that is the difference. So inductively the construction of bij is over. Now this is a open refinement of the family u alpha that is what I have told you because each time you are selecting they are contained inside u alpha right contained in some member of u alpha here and it is a covering for the whole of x. Now given x belong to x suppose x will be in one of the kks because x is union of all kks as kk is increasing family okay in one of the kks okay take nx itself kk itself that is an open subset I want to find a neighborhood with some property. So take that neighborhood to be kk itself then this nx does not meet any of the bij's if i is bigger than k plus 2. So in the k plus 1 in the k plus 1 stage remember all these things did not intersect kk minus 1 okay at kk plus 2 they will not intersect kk so they will not intersect nx. So how many of them will you intersect nx only up to k plus 1 for each k there are only finitely many j's so there are only finitely many these balls which will intersect nx where nx is kk itself okay so this proves the local finiteness all right finally let beta from b10 to i be this function in the case of rn you can actually get smooth maps and so on so I am not interested in smooth maps so I am just writing minimum of the distance between x and x and sn minus 1 okay and minimum distance x and x and minus 1 and half okay you take that and multiply by 2 so that this will be always between 0 and 1 and it is a continuous function okay you could have taken lots of suspensions anyway so I have taken one continuous function. So the idea is if you take the half the ball what is the value take half the ball here the sn minus 1 is the boundary of dn then distance between x and the boundary will be bigger than distance between x and sn minus 1 will be bigger than half right so minimum is half half multiplied by 2 is 1 so on the half ball it is identically 1 okay when the when the x rate is sn minus 1 distance is 0 so minimum is 0 so twice that one is 0 so as the x approach is sn minus 1 it is it is b it can become 0 actually sn minus 1 is precisely the set of zeros of this function and half ball it is actually 1 so this is the bump function which is not it may not be smooth because it is defined by distance function and so on so that is why you have to be careful but inside acidity is smooth but when you go to the topological space there is no question of smoothness so do not worry about smoothness so put eta ij beta composite psi ij so first takes phi ij it will come into b10 and then composite beta so these are okay where bij are the homomorphism chosen earlier extend eta ij by 0 over the whole of y because these eta ij's are such that on the closure they are identically 0 so beyond that we extend it as 0 that will be a continuous function okay now re-index this family by single letters why bother about double indexing it right in the beginning I could have done that because it is a countable anyway for each i fixed i there are finitely many j's and the what is i i range from 1 to infinity so it is just a countable family re-index it by eta j it easily verified that this family satisfies property 1 2 3 4th and 5th whatever let me just see whatever properties 1 2 3 first one is the values are between 0 and 1 that is what I told you because they are all something composite with beta and beta takes values between 0 and 1 okay and we have verified that each bij this family is locally fine and outside bij all these eta j's are 0 so it will be it will have satisfied this property and support of theta j intersection x6 u alpha because they support each inside u ij's so this is automatic okay the 4th condition we don't know yet okay so that is what we have to what we have done is these these eta j's to take larger values some like some some total okay not individually so that is what we have to be it is easily verified that is 1 2 3 now define eta i could sum up all the it has okay why this makes sense because it is locally finite in a neighborhood it is only finitely many of the swing wheel survive it is a finite sum finite sum of continuous function so it is continuous if it is continuous on every open set it is continuous in the whole space that is why eta is continuous okay but at each point there is at least 1 eta i to which x belongs to at that point the value of this eta i will be 1 whereas we are taking some what are all these non-negative functions so value will be always bigger than or equal to 1 sum total eta x is always bigger than 1 since each x belongs to some half beta j and eta j of x will be 1 at the center in the half the ball take theta j now is eta j divided by eta okay divided by eta makes sense because this is a non-negative I mean always non-zero function okay it is continuous so I can divide by eta and verify that this will require the last condition namely now some total of theta j will be always equal to 1 because numerator and denominator are same for the sum so let us look at a few fallout of this one if you begin with a smooth manifold why the theta j's can be chosen to be smooth the beta can be chosen to be smooth then all these local homeomorphism the child can be chosen to be smooth then you get a smooth okay so this is the smoothness of partition affinity for smooth manifolds naturally we now have many other consequences of existence of comfortable partition affinity such as you do not have to prove you don't slammer separately for manifolds okay so all that I told you you could have done all that you could have done normality second accountability first accountability is there and so on locally compactness is there and put together do some typology and prove compactness now you can do all that many other things also just by using partition affinity t sections in theorem can be proved by this partition affinity okay all this 10 k for example if theta j is a comfortable partition affinity on x then define f from x to 0 infinity by the by the by the formula fx equal to k times theta k okay this will be a proper mapping of x onto 0 to infinity 0 close infinity open a proper map means what inverse image of a compact that is compact okay so this I will leave to you as an exercise easy exercise take any partition affinity then redefine fx as k times theta k and take the sum okay so I have given a few exercises here which are not all that difficulty I will I will just start the the next topic of interest today but we will not go very much deeper into it so so that next time you will have some you know familiarity with this definition namely start with the definition with half space inside rn what is this all those x1 x2 xn such that nth coordinate is greater than equal to 0 so this is subspace of rn I got half space okay upper half space you can say topological space x start with this one is called a manifold with boundary this is a nomenclature I am going to use it's a straight nomenclature now I am going to extend the definition of this local euclideanness okay to cover things like closed intervals you know in my original definition open intervals are etc were manifold but closed interval was not a manifold so I have to include them so this is the this is the mechanism so what we do such that he is called manifold with boundary if it is second countable house door those things are there local euclideanness changes what is it such that each point of x has an open neighborhood ux and homeomorphism fee all this same same as but now from ux to hn instead of rn okay on to an open subset of hn open subsets of hn okay think of half we have closed interval closed at 0 infinity open okay half ray what are open subsets zero closed one open is also an open subset whereas zero closed one is not an open interval inside r inside this half space it's an open set so the half space has more open sets than the the full space okay you have to swallow this one the half space has more open sets than the full space it's a subspace though okay watch out for that so these extra open subsets will be there therefore this is an extension of the old definition namely you are allowed to have an open subset which is completely in the open part of the half space it does not touch the boundary boundaries what for points when xn the last coordinate is 0 okay then that will be an open subset of rn also because if you take xn positive here okay that is hn interior that is an open subset of rn okay so our old definition of a manifold local equidinous is valid here also but this is extended there are it will allow more more creatures okay more manifolds will come here so such manifolds are called manifolds it found okay so let us start from here next time thank you


So, this is the webinar for the MSc Research for International Development. I'm going to take you through a few key points about SOAS, the approach of the degree, and then give you a taste of the kind of issues and themes that you will be exposed to if you were to take this MSc. So, welcome. First of all, you are here either as you have an offer, so as prospective students, or whether you are interested in considering applying for this MSc. And just to start, SOAS is easily one of the world's most diverse and exciting campuses. And you will be here with us for one year of what is a very intensive learning experience. Walking with the most international campus and set of both staff and students across the world. We are of course in London that offers a lot of opportunities. And we are very confident that when you come, we will be very important moment in your intellectual life because you will be stimulated to very important inputs about the nature of development and what can be done about it in the world. The MSc Research International Development is an interdisciplinary degree that is the only one of our degrees that is funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, which is the public sector, the British government body that looks after research in international, in social sciences. And with their funding, they give a kind of seal of quality approval to the nature of this program. It is very exciting because it is an interdisciplinary and it teaches you three main things. First of all, research methods. You will be training research methods through the lenses of the main debate and topic in international development. And it also tells you to understand the link between these two dimensions because the key argument we make is that the conclusion in different positions, the different organization or scholars take when it comes to development programs, like why are some countries rich and some countries poor? Why is work so precarious and lowly remunerated in developing countries? The different positions on these questions rest on different value, politics and assumptions that researchers or institutions make and that influence their choices of research questions and research methods that they adopt when they get and collect evidence about development debates. So training in research methods is central to the three core or compulsory courses that you take for this degree. The first one is called research methods in international development. It runs in term one and there is an introduction to the fundamentals of research methods. How do you design research? How do you set your research questions? Are the main research design issues and the main type of evidence, qualitative and quantitative research that you might deploy when working as a researcher in international development? The second core course is called statistical research techniques in international development. It runs in term two and there is about learning the nuts and bolts of statistical research techniques and also very important to read critically statistics about development. Often one reads very critically numbers about a certain issue. So x percent of children are malnourished. Then we teach you the choices can you do when you create these statistics and numbers about a certain issue. And then the third core course is called battle feeds of methods approaches to international development research. So the first and the second one courses are about understanding and learning the fundamentals of research design of qualitative research and quantitative research. The core course called battle feeds of methods is saying there is more to research methods than to be able to know how you use a certain technique. Research methods are also and perhaps more importantly about politics, the politics of researchers, the politics of interest and agendas that they have, the politics over the position of a researcher within a field of colleagues with different values and politics. So we will show our politics frame research methods by introducing the connection between politics and methods and then seven case studies each lasting two weeks. They explore a certain theme or topic in development for instance microcredit and then explore a clash a political battle between two different approaches to the same topic. For instance, is microcredit the solution to poverty eradication or is this a problem because it is misleadingly celebrated as a good solution to poverty eradication. So we call it battle feeds of methods because we select case studies where you see researchers all training research methods taking very diverse and different and contrasting approaches to the same issue trying to tease out what are the politics of these and what do you do to navigate the evidence when the debate is really fairly heavily politically charged. The course is our teaching takes place in two ways either a one-hour lecture followed by a one-hour tutorial with 12 students per tutorial group or a two-hour seminar which is what battlefields of methods takes as a route. In this case you have a two-hour interactive seminar where about 50% of the time is led from me or other teachers and the other half is about coursework, attribuity, group work, question and answer sessions. In addition to core courses you will take four optional courses most of them are two over one term you can choose according to your thematic or regional interest and then there is a dissertation. The assessments vary across courses there are essays, there are book reviews, there are policy briefs, there are exams, there are single individual presentation or group presentations and we have materials to help students to familiarize with what is expected of each assignments and on top of that we provide students with office hours or academic advice slots where you get the academic advice before you write your assignments and also feedback once your assignments are returned and marked. Battlefields of Method is taught by a team while the other two core courses and most options in general are taught by a single lecture. When we talk about the teaching takes first and foremost full-time members of SOA staff together with senior PhD researcher or post-doctoral researchers who tend to hold that tutorial there's more group discussion in the core courses or in some of the options. Now in terms of prior requirements you will know that international development and development studies are by definition a multi-disciplinary social science field and you will be eased into the degree if you have prior degrees in this field but there are every year several students who come from either maths, physics, doing an academic career change or from literature languages. So I think what is realistic to expect and this is perhaps what has made you interested in this degree in first place is that you have an interest in ongoing developments in the world some basic understanding of world histories and in particular the history of Asia, Africa and Latin America. In terms of quantity of work for each course you will read approximately six c pages per course per week and that might be on top of that some newspaper or agency reports that you can read to understand this topic further. Frequently asked question is do I need to read before coming to us we say the real learning starts when you come but for those who are anxious to get going and to do some of this preliminary groundwork there are preliminary readings that are uploaded on the web and so is a case of seeing what's out there right now and the check later over in the summer for more readings if you are coming to show us. Now it's very likely that you are looking possible options for your degree so what is specific about source development studies and what is different from other degrees in development studies? First of all we are a world leading department we are consistently in the top 10 in the world and in the latest the qs world university ranking exercises in 2020 we were ranked as sixth in the world and together with the world leading excellence of our work the the brand of source development studies is famous for its critical approach to the study of development so you might be asking yourself what does critical development studies really mean is about understanding how mainstream agendas of development the one held by the world bank by the imf that the key bilateral players we look at how they are created whether they work or not and how power and relations of power affect who decides what the development agenda is and we also consider the theoretical roots of different approaches to development so for instance you ask yourself how is the economy to be run are labor regulations good or bad for development is industrialization essential for development and then we look at the the roots in theory of different policy and practical approaches of course it would be difficult to avoid any mention to the current situation that has me speaking from home and you are likely listening to this from home and that is the coronavirus emergency which of course has the shift or at least considering the possibility if campus learn degrees were forbidden in september due to the crisis to consider online or blended learning so there are possibilities of doing the so-called blended learning in which you combine on campus studying with some distance learning and these are the the five courses that have been at this part of this blended learning strategy but we offer two online degrees one is the msc international development and the other one is the msc humanitarian action now we are going to spend a few minutes giving you a taster of our teaching and that would be to think about the battlefields of methods through the case study of a researching city's urban life and trying to explore the theory assumption and research methods nexus and how it affects the type of stories and the work the different researchers tend to put forward when they study cities so the obvious point is that the rapid and sustained growth of cities and in particular the urbanization of the planet is a key feature of our time in 2014 there was a milestone where 54 percent of the world population became urban so this is a picture of the world in 1950s you can see that in red on the right of the screen i'll use the pointer can you see yeah in red on the right there are the mega cities very few of them in the south and then orange yellow is about slowing a lower number of inhabitants so orange is a cities with five to ten million inhabitants yellow is one to five and going down and down as we go left towards the screen and you can see very little of the world population was living in red areas 0.9 percent while the majority of the planet was gray which is rural now fast forward this to the present to 2015 you see how many reds and orange and to some extent yellow spots are in the in in the world i go back and forth so you can visualize it again from here to here and so is what we need to notice is how much cities are growing and now so much of the global growth of urban life is taking place in latin america asia and africa so unsurprisingly the interest of social science in the understanding cities of the global south or of development country is growing and what you have is a proliferation of approaches that try to understand the nature of urban life that the political and policy priorities for cities and i want to illustrate that the clash between two approaches the so-called post-colonial approach against the political economic approach to urban life and i think the key is to understand that there are fundamental questions we have to ask ourselves or that we are even asking even if we are not aware of it when we ask the research questions of our work when we design our research so the first question is does attention to diverging levels of development matter when we try to understand the urban experience across the world what are the assumptions and standpoints that inform different research agendas and how do they affect the choices of the research methods that these researchers make finally if you were to express your opinion after you've done this work what are the distinctive traits strengths and weaknesses of different theoretical approaches so starting with the post-colonial narratives on the southern cities there is very recently this idea that we need to move away from understanding the urban experience of cities in development countries as chaos as dystopia and instead we need to understand that these cities follow a different order and that if we understand that there is some very important hope that we can derive from the study of the city so it's an attack to Eurocentric approaches to understanding cities as failure the fact that they look at Dar es Salaam and Tanzania or they look daily in India and approaches of a certain tradition tend to emphasize the things that don't work the fact that these cities are cities as a policy failure and they say hold on a minute we need to move away from materialistic explanation of urban life center failure and we need to go beyond what they deem as an obsession to attention to levels of development as the central entry point to understand cities so a key scholar following this tradition says every city is ordinary enough of calling Maputo or Dar es Salaam or whatever city in the south as dysfunctional every city is ordinary you just need to understand the different logic that each city has now compare this with the second approach we are reviewing here which is the political economy approach there is a scholar called Mike Davis who wrote this book called Planet of Slums and these is a quite uh anxiety driving read because he starts explaining that what is historically unprecedented is the fact that for the first time we have over one billion people living in the slums of cities of the south in and I quote pollution, extreme and decay why is that because they say these are cities without jobs where the failure to create jobs for the those who live in cities or move to city looking for a better life creates what it calls a surplus humanity a humanity that has no place in the economy of this place absolutely unable to get a foot into the formal economy so if you ask the same question as before what is it that defines the nature of cities in cities of developing countries when you compare it to that of other parts of the world the answer here would be we need to pay attention to different levels of development because they do affect the differences in levels of economic growth and income in these cities a cities which has no industry behind it will be unable to employ its population and that leads to the deprivation that is typical of slums life and this level of development will have a profound impact on outcomes and on urban possibilities so you can see is a clash where the room for common ground is not there what we need to do is therefore understand how is it that two different social scientists reach such a different conclusion when they look at cities of the global south so we take this debate and we have a two-hour session exploring this debate and then for the second week of this case study remember each case study is taught over two week you will take one of three books of your choice all available as a e-book on in sauce library and you prepare through independent reading for the next week task which is a in-class group work so you have done your reading you've done your notes so you bring them to the classroom and in group you will prepare a presentation not lining and critically assessing three things the link between the evidence that the book presents the research methods that e deploys to generate this evidence and its theoretical contribution so the key points that you need to bring to the class is what is the key argument of the book what are its implications for development practice and intervention so this is not just about theory but trying to tease out the practical implication of theoretical which is pull up the key quotes to really define the key arguments of the book and then together with a strong sense of what the scholar is saying you then need to come with your own argument do you agree with the argument of this book if so why if not why and then you fit this to the group work and then you prepare a presentation so this is a very brief taste there of the kind of work that we do the themes the color the linking of the thematic issue in this case the nature of urban life with the research methods dimensions of this what jobs prospects after the degree you have quite a broad range of skills you are trained in research methods confident in the use of the main quantitative and qualitative research techniques you are also develop an understanding through the core courses and through the optional courses that you select of the main debates in international development and you are quite fungible and flexible as a prospective employee because you have the thematic expertise about some debates the main ones but you also have a capacity read these debates critically because you can explore how is it that a certain researcher reach that kind of conclusion how does he square with the approach of another voice that has a very different take on this sound surprisingly because they are flexible because they come from a famous institution we found that our graduates do very well in the labor market after graduation another thing is if you are interested I couldn't put you in touch with our graduates either and then you can get their feedback on their experience we find that they tend to work in two sets of job either as policy advisor and researchers in international development working in the public governments of developing country private or NGO third sector kind of institutions and for instance there is a recent graduate that is now working in monitoring and evaluation in Mozambique or there are those who work as in the policy departments of organization the second type of career avenue is that of further research doctoral studies either so in other universities what we find is that you are a very well trained prospective PhD students because again you have a strong training in the research methods and design so with the training in research methods you have the flexibility for your research project of deploying a number of methods rather than knowing just one and then you also also have that work over research design so this is in an actual what I wanted to give you and now there is time for question and answers which I think the best way is use the chat and send to everyone so that I can then reply okay you can also record messages in messages in this chat maybe okay maybe I can talk about the questions that see here so I got one from a young John Cheng will the school change any arrangement of the courses due to the coronavirus we need to see of course the situation changes from now to September our changes with regard to the coronavirus emergencies and our changes with regard to our capacity for the time being we are offering this course as an on campus only degree you can take the MSc international development online if you would like to study online but still with a source degree it might be that if the situation becomes clear to be a long-term one that there might be a push to make this and other degrees available online very quickly and I can follow up that with you but for time for the time being you are offered this degree only online okay of course if you want to know more after I answer your question just write again and I can follow up any unclear aspects now I have a question from Ruisci will the department organize extra development studies talks seminars delivered by external guests politicians NGO workers absolutely we do in a number of ways we have a weekly seminar in international development which is really world leading where outsiders and very rarely occasionally our member of staff present cutting edge research and is a very prestigious seminar series on top of that on top of that there is the professional practice seminar that brings external speakers who work in international development practice talk about their work and what can be learned from it for our students and the would be development practitioners on a weekly basis do the curriculum and faculty also reflect the diversity so as price itself on absolutely so the the the faculty in terms of members of staff is very diverse our staff from India from different parts of Europe from Africa one member of staff so is as diverse as you will get a profile of member of staff you can quickly log in and look at our member of staff and you will get a sense of that the in terms of the curriculum is very diverse in a number of ways first of all it's heterodoxy is capacity to give space to radical critiques of international development and then there is also that element very big these days of trying to decolonize the reading list and the curriculum in a way that reflects the current requests by students and staff worldwide I have another question from Stosci will we have a chance to conduct on the spot survey in developing countries not as part of your compulsory studies what you do is there is a dissertation and you need to agree to supervise the topic part of your dissertation some students undertake fieldwork and that would be the scenario that Satoshi is would be choosing if interesting carrying a survey we need to be realistic about the time and how compress is the time for a dissertation because you are finishing assignments course exams the latest early June or mid-May and then you need to submit by September so it is unlikely that you are able to do very large-scale survey but many students choose to do or not many a significant but not the majority of students choose to do fieldwork for their dissertation another question from Ruisci does SOAS offer any field trip opportunities we don't provide that as part of our studies we if students undertake fieldwork for their dissertation they do so by funding it and there are very limited opportunities for fieldwork for that but basically that the rule of thumb is that if you're doing fieldwork for your dissertation you need to have the means to organize it and often people who have connections in development link it with the interest of an organization that will then fund their studies and trip do we have another question from a young Gau Cheng do we have our own academic advisors for our dissertations yes you do it works that you are writing a dissertation proposal that is handed in in February then we allocate supervisors and then you are working with your supervisors towards the development of your dissertation through a number of meetings and they take place over the summer term with a certain deadline after which no supervision is allowed but each of you as a dedicated academic supervisor deliver supervision for the dissertation development I am now posing leaving you time for writing other questions if you have any if you on the other end don't have any more questions just let me know and we can bring this to an end no do we have to defend our dissertation asks charades no it is submitted and then marked by your supervisor and another member of staff but there's no vibe any other question yes there is a question from really she is this course a direct pathway to apply for phd in international development as so yes it is so this course is available as an msc a standalone but is also available if I told you that is a src funded so as part of the src funding there are a number of studentships available every year and depending success in a competition for the scholarships and they have applications that run every year in december the preliminary round and then in I think late january the full application is invited if you pass the preliminary round and then we are deciding now for next year so for next year you have already missed the boat on funding by every year if you are able to apply by december the year before your studies you can compete for funding and there are places for the so-called one plus three funding pathway where you do the first year the msc research for international development and then you move to a phd in international development at source uh wish you can you clarify what is the minimum grade that you need to achieve for what uh there's no there's no uh rule but it's a very competitive uh process the one for funding so uh you it's also not just about grades it's about the statement the proposed research the match to the proposed supervisor because when you apply for a one plus three uh studentship what you need to do is in the application put a two-page proposal research proposal with also a training plan which you need to work out with your prospective supervisor so if we don't just look at grades there are people who get funded with a two one there are people who get funded with the first but it is a very competitive process so the strongest degree uh the more you are helping yourself in the competition a little bit any more questions thank you yang gong cheng if you have any other query question you can email me and as you can see in the last slides you just need to add my initials mr like mr three at soas dot ac dot uk so mr three dot ac dot uk so rishi you are also good you have any more question okay thank you very much for joining you stay safe wherever you are uh actually i haven't asked you what part easy with this meeting where are you based when you listen to this rishi is in darum charades in the netherlands hong kong and satoshi is in japan vegin vegin okay so stay safe whatever you are and if you have any other question just email me and i can try to answer it okay bye take care


So, hello everyone, and thank you for being here today in the second webinar of the Moodle Academy. The webinar is about assessment, exploring assignments, and I am Anna Krasa, Education Advisor here in Moodle HQ, and with me I have Mary Kuch, Education Manager here again from Moodle HQ. And together we are going to discuss and see how assessment can be done through using assignments. This session is a combination of a presentation and a live demo. So, you will have the opportunity to see things both from the student perspective and the teacher perspective. And if you want to, you can also log in into the course, the activities will be open now. And access the assignments, the exams that we have already prepared yourself as students. Now, if you want to keep your eyes on the screen and on this Zoom window, that's fine because afterwards you have also the option to replicate those examples exactly as we created in the course. Since we have inside the course, you will find PDF with all the settings of the assignments. So, before starting with the assignment, let's see a little bit a few things about assessment in Moodle in general. So, Moodle can support different assessment methods and different grading methods and has several activity types. The assessment methods can support is actually the auto-assessment, so system assessed by its own automatically. And we have also trainers or teachers assessment. And also we have options like activities for peer assessment where learners assess each other. Moodle also supports grading method, two different grading methods. We have a simple direct grading where grading can be done with a simple numerical scale 06, 010, 0100, whatever you want. Or a custom scale. A custom scale could be something verbal like a missing, weak, fair, strong, or a five-star scale. Or you can choose to set to no grade at all. And also in the advanced grading, we have two options, the rubric and the marking guide. But we are going to see this together later, so I won't say anything about this. As I said before, there are several graded activities in Moodle. We have the human graded activities, as I call them. And they are the activities that require another person, either it's a teacher or a student to assess. And these are the assignment, the forum, the glossary, the database, and the workshop. And we have the system graded, those that are automatically graded, which are the quiz, the lesson, the H5P, and score. So today we're going to focus only on the assignment. And as you can assume, this means that we're going to have more assessment sessions and webinars in the academy. Let's see about how, what are the aspects we need to be aware regarding assessing with assessments. So assignments can be used both for formative and summative assessment. In the formative assessment, the goal is learning. In the summative assessment, the goal is assessment, evaluation. So in the first case of formative assessment, we create assignments that are usually always available and they don't necessarily need to be graded. On the other hand, when we have summative assessment, we tend to set a start and then cut off dates, keep things strict. And also we definitely grade them. In formative assignments, we offer usually additional things and sometimes until someone passes, if we say the pass score. While in summative, we rarely open, reopen a new assignment, perhaps manually. In formative assignments, we don't need the pass grade. We don't, and the completion of the assignment could be said to view or submit. While in the summative assignments, we definitely need the pass grade and the completion criteria is usually a grade, requires a grade. And when we set up this within a course, we often use a 0% way for a formative assignment, while when we have a summative assignment, we use more than 20% usually. It's not strict, but often it takes a big weight. So assignments basically allow students to submit their work for teachers to assess it. This is the very basic concept. And it's one of the most easy activities to set up in Moodle. Yet, it has several settings. And depending the combination of the settings, you can actually create completely different experience for your learners. So together, we are going to see a number of settings and different setups. Before that, let's start with a poll that help us know each other. Let me initiate this. Do you see it? Yes, I can see it, Anna. Thank you. So let's all have a go at the poll. There are three questions. Tell us a bit for your background, what are you doing? And what are you using Moodle for? How long actually? And if you have ever used assignments. It's very interesting to see the answers here, Anna, shortly, yes. And as a reminder, do feel free to type your personal experiences in the chat and questions as we go through the different types of assignments as well. Thank you, Mary. So I think I'm going to end the poll here. Okay, 15 people, 16. Oh, a little bit more. Let's wait for the last one to participate or perhaps not some. Okay, I'm ending the poll and let me serve the results. Do you see them? I can see them, yes. So mostly trainers we have here and we have mostly people more than two years who are using assignments often and regularly. That's good because that means hopefully we should have quite a few comments in the chat, Anna, as we're going along. Yeah, it seems that we have a very experienced trainers here, most of them, and I hope that you will find something interesting in this webinar. So I'm stop saying this poll and let's move on. And we will begin with the assignment submissions. First of all, we can create an assignment that requires no submission. This assignment could be used to assess an offline event. So in this case, learners are here, don't need to submit anything, but teachers can see a list of the names and offer grade and feedback. We're going to see an example with no submission required, and we're going to have an activity with a date set, no submission required and feedback comments, enabled for the teachers and the grading will be done with zero 10 grade. Let's see it. If you want to, you can access the course and see the section one, no submission required. And our first assignment is the archaeological museum visit. We assume that we are in a school in a secondary school and there is a trip educational trip organized by the teacher visit to the archaeological museum. The task here for the learners is to participate in the event that will be held in the museum. So as a learner, there's not much you can do all you can see is the dates and perhaps leave a comment if you want to, but there is no actual submission. So let's take a look. As a teacher now as a teacher, I can see I have two options that you all submission and the grade. Let's take the grade. Now, here, I would have a submission but I have the note that doesn't require a submission. So I can simply give a score and save grade work. And I can simply save and so next or just save changes. And here I can notify I can select to notify or not learners. If I antique this and save changes then learners won't take a receipt won't take an email notification saying that I have reviewed their work. So let's go back. I would like to hear from you. Would you use a no submission assignment or have you used before actually have you used one Mary. Yes, so while people are typing in the chat hopefully you can give us your experience whether you've used this type or not. I can say that I did use to use this quite often when I taught languages in a high school, because for speaking practice this was obviously in a blended environment we had classes. In the school and then we would set homeworks and so on online with Moodle. So I would assess their speaking face to face in class, but then I would use the no submission assignment to grade them. This was actually before the time when you can now record your voice audio or video through ATO. So this was very useful for us too. Also as a kind of a attendance sheet if you're going on a on a trip just to check that students are present. So do we have anyone who's actually tried this and if not it will be interesting to know if we might have persuaded you to give this a go so we'll just have a quick look in the chat. Kim is saying I've used it she's used it for offline graded activities as you have presented. Yeah there are two ways you could grade offline activities, you could go straight into the grade book, but actually this I think is a much simpler way of doing it and is more accessible for your students to know the grade that you've given them. Kim is saying to give some points for class discussion participation or attendance to be to appear in the grade book. Gemma says she used it for attendance, but also for preparing to read a file that would be discussed in class. So that's some ideas there for you Anna. Thank you all so much. And let's move on and see another type of submission for our assessment assignments. Online submission, usually with most of the in most of the cases we usually ask learners to make a submission and turning on the online submission we actually asked learners to write something inside moodle inside the course inside the assignment for them to review and grade. And when I say right doesn't mean literally right anymore. Since the field where users add their text contains the other editor and with the other that we can now have and rich text with all the stylist will want and links and icons and images. We also can directly record audio and video up to two minutes so we can have multimedia submission actually. But everything done through the other editor. And we are going to see a second example with online text we have enabled a world limit of 100 words and in this assignment we require learners to click the submit button. It means that learners can can make submissions and their submissions will be kept as draft until they actually click the submit button for teachers the comment in line and the feedback comments is are enabled and also PDF annotation. We have set the grading up to a point scale symbol direct grading zero 10 scale. So let's see it inside the course you will see, you can see the second section online text submission, and now our assignments reflection. You can see that the description, of course, and the add submission. So, when a learner makes a submission. Then the submission status changes, and is shown as a draft not submitted, and it won't be submitted until learner clicks actually the submit assignment. You can, this means that your learners can work on their submission for for long time, you can begin this activity, this assignment at the beginning of the semester and close it at the end of the year. So they can keep coming again and again and again editing editing, and when the field they are ready, they will click submit. So, normally I would show you the PDF annotation in my in the life set in the life side, but I've noticed that it's a bit is slowed down my machine because I'm sharing my screen so I'm going to show you a couple of screenshots. As we said, in this assignment we have enabled both PDF annotation that's why we see all these left window, and we also have enabled the inline comments. So let's take things one by one. Let's focus first on the PDF submission. If we just want to work with the PDF submission, we can simply click here, the little icon and change the layout of our screen and make things more clear. When we use a PDF annotation, we can leave comments and create different colors of comments. These are items are clickable and when you click them you see the full text in and you can draw or you can make underlines and other shapes. And also you can highlight, like here in different colors and use stamp as well if there are some icons that you can use a stamp. Now, let us see this inside the course. Let's go great something. As you can see, the PDF window appears, but of course here we don't have any submission. So let me collapse the PDF annotation panel and focus now on the submission. Let's find an activity. Let's find an assignment actually that needs to be grading and I'm filled in here if it requires grading. I don't have my friend learner one has made the submission I can read here. And I can give the score. I was thinking. And if I want to, because I have enabled the inline comments, I have the ability to see the submission text inside in my feedback comments. This means that I can come here. And perhaps in italics, leave a comment. And I can just notify my learner saying comments in italics and I can save and move on to the next one or I can just save changes and that's all done. So now let's go back to a presentation. And I want to ask you PDF annotation or inline comments, what would you prefer? What you would prefer Mary and what you all prefer. Okay, well, I can tell you what my preferences in my experience and then we'll see what people are saying in the chat. I'm a big fan of online text because again, with teaching languages at a fairly low level to sort of 15 16 year olds. They never had a lot to type only a couple of hundred words. So online text was perfect for them. I prefer the inline comments because I like being able to go into the feedback box and cross things out or using the editor or highlighting things in a different color. Although of course we have to be aware of accessibility and you know the concerns about explaining mistakes by using different colors only. But let's see what people are saying if the if other people prefer PDF annotation. Okay, so Gemma prefer prefers PDF annotation it'd be interesting if you could tell us why Gemma Kim says both depending on what she's assessing. And of the can makes a very good point about preferring PDF annotation especially when visuals are including. And Kim says using PDF annotation to grade or to mark up imaging submissions, whereas rather than agrees with me prefers online commenting is easier and quicker. Some people sometimes have issues getting the PDF annotation to work but most times it can be very good if, especially if you're a fan of stamps or the comments and so on that Anna demonstrated in your screenshots there. I think that's it for now Anna. Thank you. Thank you so much. Let's move on. The other type and the type of submission we have is a file submission. In this case learner submit a file for teachers to assess. We are going to see an assignment where we only allow document file. See teacher has the right to the capability to restrict the specific number or the specific type of submission allowed. So here we allow only ODP and doc files and learners have to accept the submission statement. This is interesting because this is a warning for learners that a reminder that be sure that this assignment that you are this work that you are submitting is your own sense not borrowed from somebody else. Here we also have set up additional attempts to open automatically until pass. We have a simple direct grading with zero 10 point scale and pass course set to a so feedback comments and files are enabled here and offline grading works in and figure files are also allowed. Let's see it. You can access the section three file submission. And see the article review. Here we are in a university and we ask learners to submit an article review about quality in education and they have to write a thousand five hundred words following the app of style for those who are familiar with the academic writing. And learners all they have to do is to click and add the submission. Please note that the attempt number we have this attempt is number one. And this is interesting. Let's go see as a teacher. And great one activity. So let's click great. If you remember I had already filtered to see what requires grading here. So I'm seeing the work of learning one and I see the file here I have to download the file, read it and give great make my comments perhaps send back feedback with comments file with comments and at the bottom it's interesting to see that you can see the attempt settings and see which number of them is this and how many attempts are still left. And that's kind of things. But when I have personal that's my this is my experience actually what I like to do when I have submission fights, fights as submissions, I prefer not to go through this page and grade one by one, but I prefer to view all the submissions and work from here. Now, here you can you have several options very interesting options. For example, if you have connectivity issues you may download all the submissions and review them offline. If you can download the grading works it. It's a CSV file at downloads I can show you how it looks. So you get a CSV file with users name and mail address and submissions. You can write the grade and the feedback comments. And then from here you can upload it and release all the grades and feedback at once to everyone. And similarly you can upload multiple feedback files if you want to. Now, from this page I can filter to see what requires grading or what is a draft or check several options. I'll leave it to grading and I have the ability also for a quick grading. When I click the quick grading, you see the grade here is opens and editable field as well as the feedback comments. But this time I think my friend later on one didn't do very well. Please review your work and resubmit. And when I'm done with all the notes I can save quick grading changes. Now, if you remember, we have set up this assignment to automatically reopen until pass grade is reached. That's why my friend who needed to accept the submission statement before submitting. When he got five, he didn't reach a five out 10, he didn't reach the passport. He actually failed. And when he fails, the attempt reopens automatically. It's marked as a second attempt. And he can see that he can add a new attempt based on previous submission or start a new submission from scratch. He has those options. Now, here in this example, we have seen two things. One is the submission statement is the line that they need to click to in order to make the submission and the reopen until pass. And I would like to ask you, would you use this? Which one actually would you use for formative and which one setting would you use for summative assessment? Mary, what do you think? Well, I'll see. Let's see what people say in the chat. I can give you my experience of submission statement and not reopening until pass while people are typing actually. This is exactly what the situation was when I did a master's a couple of years ago, which was on Moodle using Moodle, which was great. And of course, we had to upload for each of our summative assessment at the end of each semester, a word document. So it was restricted to word documents. And we had to agree to the submission statement. And then of course it went through a plagiarism detector as well. So that was just one grade. So in terms of reopening until you pass, what do people think in the chat there? Would that suit formative or summative assessment? And does anyone have any experiences or thoughts on that? Do you always use a submission statement? We use this in Moodle Educator Certification, for example, obviously to ensure that what people submit for their certification is their own work. Kim is saying, right. So Kim is saying, I agree, submission statement for the summative and then reopen until pass for formative assessment, which I think is what you would expect, Anna. Yeah, I think so too. But we can always be creative in the software settings, depending on the context we are working on. Absolutely. Everything depends yet. So let's move on. So far, we have seen cases where one learner was doing an individual submission for teachers to review. But assignments don't have to be an individual's work. Actually it can be a collaborative work. If we create groups in our courses, we can set the group submission on in an assignment. And in this case, we will have the group members collaborating inside the assignment and making a final submission for teacher to grade and provide feedback. And of course, the feedback goes to the whole team member. Now, we have two options here regarding the submissions. We have the option where one of the team members requires to make the submission. And we have also another option where everybody from the team requires to click the submit button. Of course, all the members of the team do submit the same thing, but requiring to click the submit button. It's like he actually asked the learner to confirm that they are okay with the work submitted. So we have set up an example with online text requiring, requires learners to click the submit button. This means that learners can keep drafts of their work until they are ready. And then each member of the group will have to click and make a submission. And we have feedback comments for teachers and a civil rating with zero landscape. Now let's, you can see, but in this case, please be aware that this assignment has been set up to accept submission from people who belong in group. And you are not belong into a group. You don't belong in a group. That's because this course is a self-paced course will remain open as a self-paced course. So groups won't be maintained. We only have one group and we have our two test learners inside so you can access it but you can only actually replicate it in your site with the settings provided. So here we have our friends London one and learning to and they are both members of a group pay. And they have made an online submission and as you see it's a yet as draft so they can still edit it and after the initial submission. Both of them, both of the learners see the online text and see exactly the options to edit the submission remove it or submit the assignment. So, while the assignment is still in draft, they can come and edit again and again one after the other multiple times and work on the same online text submitted here. And when they are done, they will have to actually click the submit button actually they will have both of them to click this submit button. Let's see this from a teacher's perspective. So, we are in a corporate learning environment this time, and we have same department colleagues group together, and they have to do a SWOT analysis and set up a smart action plan, very typical things in a corporate environment. As you can see, the setting requires group to make a submission. So, either you are at the system gives me a warning that some people are not member of a group, or they might be belong in more than one group so there is a problem for the for them to make submission. But this is a deliberate deliberate setup. Let's go great. As you can see I have two users here, and I can see their submission. And I can give them a great normally. Well, actually, they didn't do very much work. And I can give them my feedback for the work. And at the bottom, you can see we have the group submission settings. And we can choose to apply the grades and feedback to the entire group at once. So whatever I write here goes to both of the learner one and two, or give them separate feedback. Now, with this setting and this option in mind, I would like to ask you, would you give the same grade and feedback to all group members, or would you prefer in a group assignment to give different feedback and great to its team member. Mary, what do you think? Well, I've got strong feelings about it actually, but I think the, I think the answer is probably it does depend on your learners and your situation and the task that you've said. But when I use group assignments, we didn't use online texts we used to get, I would have a class of say 30 we would have groups of about five. We would each upload different types of files that together made a whole package. And I had with the teenagers issues with some group members working harder than others. And so I insisted that they all submitted each group members submitted, and then I graded them separately, even though it was actually a group assignment. But I do appreciate that in certain circumstances. And again, as in my masters we, we worked in one of our modules, we worked in a group I think it was a group of four. And that in that one we all got the grade together. So be very interested to see what people in the chat, what your experiences of whether you give the same grade and feedback or different. Or indeed, if you've used group assignments, or if we might have persuaded you to try them. We're just waiting to see if anyone has any comments there. At the moment, I think we don't have any comments on group assignments that's interesting. Perhaps it's not something that's used a lot by the people in our chat. Jessica. So you can give the same grade, but you can allow group members to peer assess. And in fact, this is something that happened in my in my masters as well. So that feedback can increase the individual group members grade. And it still says without a feedback sheet it's hard to know who did what on a group project. Yes, it depends on what the task is that you're setting them for example, if it is an online text assignment, then how do you know who's written what, unlike in a wiki for example yes. But anyway, that's that's that for now and thank you. Well, I have to say that I, I had a really bad experience with group assignments, not, I think it's not a problem with teenagers I think we can find this in any age actually. People don't contribute to say, and it's difficult actually the assessor the cannot pretty tell who did what usually. And in this case is yes as Jessica said, a feedback for peer assessment peer evaluation of the experience it's perhaps the, the best option. Let's move on. And let's see for the assignments the advanced grading options, what we have. We have a marking guide, and when we use a marking guide teachers enter a comment per criteria and the markup up to a maximum. It's a bit complicated but we will see this in detail. The point is that when we use a marking guide and advanced grading method, we actually don't change the flow of the assignment, we just give more options about grade and feedback to the learner to the teacher. So, we are going to see an example that is the requires an online text submission, and a file submission is also enabled. And we are going to assess this with a marking guide, the maximum grade is eight and the past score is set to eight. We have this example at the sections five assignment with marking rubric, you may check it. And I have to tell you when teachers set up the marking guide has the ability to so or not the grading criteria with the learner so if he does, if they do. The grading criteria will show up before when a learner comes in, and I personally prefer this as give some help to learners on what is expected from them and what they need to cover. So you can see in both the criteria and some explanation text and the maximum score they can get. Now let's take a look as a teacher. Let's go grade one. So I have the submission here. And afterwards I have the grade section where I can see the criteria here for pre criteria. And also I can see some comments. In fact I can see comments that the comments that teacher created for the learners, and I can hide them if I don't want them, and also descriptions for teachers. I found this very helpful to be honest, because they give me an idea of how this criteria must be assessed. What should I expect as a grader for learners to write about this. And I guess come here start typing my, my feedback, or I can click the insert frequently used comment and select one and give my grade here for the first criteria, and then check. What should I do even better here. And this is actually very convenient and it really speeds up grading and make it very specific very clear. So I can move on assessing everybody else like this. Now, do you use marking guides in your work. Do they fit in your case. Yeah, I remember training it was I think the history department and explaining about marking guides. They thought it was a good idea but it seemed to be a lot of effort to set it up initially. And they showed them about the frequently used comments and they were completely won over, and they loved it because of course especially if you have many students, and also if you're several teachers working in a department, it allows you to be consistent in how you are grading students between teachers, and also it does save you a lot of time, and you agree beforehand what your frequently used comments are. So it's a great time saver, once you make the effort to set it up. Yeah, so we have. Yeah, people are fans of marking guides says she uses marking guides when she has frequently common feedback. Jessica also always like marking guides and Kim is suggesting agreeing with me that it does take some time to set up. But of course you only need to do this once, and then you're done and can hasn't used it but does like it maybe we can persuade you then to try that can. Excellent. Thank you so much. And another method advanced grading method is the grading rubric. Again, we are focusing on the stage of grading and feedback and this is what changed. The techniques are basically a table like this one where we have a list of criteria and different levels for evaluating its criteria. So, we are going to see an example with online text and world limit setup with rubric of course the maximum grade is set to 10 and the past score is eight. And you can see it in the six, six section assignment with rubric. Again, as a teacher I have chose to serve the grading rubric criteria and levels with the students in advance. So they have in mind what, how they're going to be assessed. Sorry, let's go check it as teachers, this one, and grade activity. I have here the submission. And below that, I have the grade section, which contains the whole rubric.  Yeah, not very good here. And also I can give feedback for this specific criteria, tell them what to do best and how to improve their work. I can give them for the start something good language was great vocabulary was average. And I can save and so next, of course, if I want to provide an overall feedback for the whole work. I can also name the feedback comments, and I will be seeing at the bottom, an extra feedback section. But please tell me, are you or will you consider to use rubrics. Well, I can tell you Anna that I have used rubrics in my past and present life. In fact, it worked really well for assessing writing as a languages teacher because the examination criteria were that you had to grade students on accuracy. Of course, content, did they actually answer the question that was set in the writing a task and style as well did they use an appropriate style or register. Moving on from when I was a teacher and coming into moodle of course, Anna and I and our MEC moodle educator certification facilitators, we use rubrics to assess in each of the courses bring building up to the certification. And as it has been said here, they were very popular with students, students like it because they get detailed feedback, but it's also very fast for teachers to operate. And it's another thing like marking guides, as long as you take the initial time to set it up, the benefits then are manifold. Yes. And Emma says that they recommend using it, although don't see much evidence of it in use. And Caroline says it's an easy way to clearly demonstrate the assessment expectations to students it is a worthwhile time investment. So I think everyone is in agreement there. Okay. We are all agree that it's really worth the effort. That's, that's for sure. I think it gives clarity and it manage expectations and set the fairness I mean between a learners and assessors. Yes. Moving on to our last example. And this is something different that we are going to see. We're going to study marketing workflow. So far we have seen one learner or multiple learners to make one submission for one teacher to review and get feedback. But now we're going to see learners make a submission for several teachers to review the assignment. So, marking workflow actually creates an internal cycle between teachers regarding grading. So we have an assignment submitted. First teacher reviewed gives a great feedback and pass it over to a second teacher who gives again a gradient feedback and this circle can make several rounds until both more teachers agree. And they are ready to release the grades and feedbacks to the learner. So we are going to see an example that requires online text with the word limit setup. File submissions are enabled and requires only images and feedback comments are set up for teachers commenting line as well great is a simple direct 010 scale. Marking workflow and marking allocation are enabled. Let's see assignment with marking workflow section seven. And for learners what they actually see it's not really impressive. Perhaps the grading status is what is interesting. It's the in outsource no market when things begin but as the marking workflow moves on it can be say that it's in marking assignment is assignment marking is completed or it's in review. It's ready for release or it's released. Be aware that learners will only be able to see the feedback and the grade when released status is set. So let's go and check the becoming a journalist. So you are in an online course about journalism and you have to write to cover an event to be published at your local newspaper. So you're happy will be reviewed by your trainer but also will have to be evaluated by an editor. That's why marking workflow is enabled here. And I can see the event. You can see the images. That's the whole submission. I have a simple direct grading up to 10. I think this is average needs some fixing. And I have here the marking workflow state. I would say this is in marketing because I already gave a grade. And after giving my feedback here. Let's say I think that all things need to do be said or whatever. I can choose another greater actually the reviewer who's married to pass the assignment over. So this this assignment will remain in marketing until married review. We may change our opinion several times and keep this state in marketing. But when we will be ready for release and we will be ready to share our thoughts and feedback with learners who will change it to release. And saving and give it away. So I'm not sure if anyone has tried this. Would you have you tried or would you think of using the marketing workflow. Very heavy you I haven't actually I can see how it is really useful especially as you say. If you are in an organization where you need someone to moderate or or verify your grading to ensure consistency. Claire is saying there that this looks great for moderation I agree. Kim uses it and I've heard of this also she uses it to release all feedback at the same time. So I think we might be getting some fans here who would be interested in trying marketing workflow. And you're right I'm not sure many people have actually used it but it has a lot of potential there. To be honest it was one of those settings that I've been looking for. I've been seeing them in the list of assignment settings I was I wasn't daring to take a look. But when I finally did I was very impressed of the capabilities that gives you. I was asking a question here do all submissions need to be marked by multiple tutors. Or could you select a few to be moderated but the rest marked by just one person I think the answer is you have a lot of control over who marks what and who moderates what don't you Anna. I don't know if you remember when I click to allocate to another marker. I could see my own name as well as yours so I could keep it on to myself so by that I could just say it's me the marker it's allocated to me and I can just choose to release it so you don't have to review it. So it's quite flexible if you use marking allocation, a marking workflow with marking allocation, you can select and decide what to do, and who does what actually. So thank you so much for this. Let's go for our last poll quickly we just are in the hour. It's just a wrap up for. Let me know when you see it. Yes, I can see it now Anna. Perfect. So, what, what we would like to hear from you is, which of these settings that we have seen today are for completely new to you. I don't know if there will be anything new actually because you were all quite experienced. And which is the first thing that you want to try with your learners. Okay, while people are answering can has a question actually does the allocation selection notify the grader that they have items to grade. I'm not sure it does actually. Yes, I think when you, when you look in and you see what needs to be assessed you will see those that are allocated to you, I think that's how it works. Okay, thank you. Well, we see how we're getting on with our poll shortly. Okay, it seems that. Let's just wait a few seconds more. Okay, and I'm releasing. Ending the poll and starting results. So, right, group submission PDF annotation offline grading. Marking guide rubric marking workflow are quite new marking workflow actually is the most new I'm very happy that we saw that today. About the first thing that somebody will try is the group submission PDF annotation quick grading marking guide rubric and marking workflow again, the winner will say marking workflow. That's great. That's to last yes. I'm really happy to know that to hear that. I'm happy actually that you found something new in this webinar. And that was it actually our assessment exploring assignments webinar has now come into an end. Thank you so much for being here assignments are quite diverse have so many settings and we haven't see them. All of them, for example, haven't seen the anonymous admission and we haven't see the high graders identity for from learners. But I think the possibilities are endless and definitely encourage you to experiment. And you can come from the course, download the PDF with the settings and replicate the exact activities that we have here. So thank you so much for being here. Thank you.