Ephorus Blackboard Building Block Manual For Instructors Version: 2.0 Date: June 1, 2007
Content Create Assignments... 3 View Assignments... 5 The Report... 6 2
Create Assignments In order to create an assignment you have to browse to the relevant course. In this case we want to create a group assignment for the course Ephorus Demo. Once you have browsed to the right course you can click Assignments in the Course menu to get an overview of the assignments in this course. By switching to edit view (via the link in the right top of the overview) you can modify existing assignments or add a new assignment. A new assignment can be created by selecting Ephorus Assignment in the drop down list and clicking the Go button next to this drop down list. 3
In the form that is displayed now you can specify the properties of the assignment. The only required field is the name of the assignment. The other properties are optional and speak for themselves. When the new assignment has been created it is displayed in the Assignment Overview. When you have chosen the assignment to be a group assignment you have to create groups (if they do not already exist) via Control Panel Manage Groups. 4
View Assignments After you created an assignment you can monitor the submission via the Control Panel. In the Course Tools menu you click Ephorus Assignment. A list of all Ephorus Assignments is displayed, together with some information about the number of students that have submitted their assignment. By clicking the title of an assignment you can monitor the assignment. In this overview all students are listed. In case of a group assignment the name of the group is displayed between brackets behind the name of the student that submitted the group assignment. The comment a student typed when submitting the assignment might not fit in the column. If so, three dots between brackets are displayed and when pointing your mouse at the comment the full comment appears. In the column Similarities found the status of the document is stated. Possible states are: [a percentage] The percentage indicates the total amount of similar texts found; not submitted The student did not submit the assignment yet; duplicate The document is identical to a document uploaded before; checking The document is currently being processed at Ephorus; cannot be checked The document could not be processed by Ephorus. When a student has uploaded his assignment in the last column two buttons are displayed. The rework button enables you to ask the student to submit a new version of the assignment. The view report button links you to the report, which will be discussed on the next page. 5
The Report There are two versions of the report: a summary and a detailed version. By default the summary is displayed first. At point 1) information about the submitted document is displayed. You can also access the original document here. If Ephorus could not process the document an error message is displayed here. At point 2) you can switch between the type of report you want to see at point 4). At point 3) an overview of the sources Ephorus found. These sources contain (partial) similarities with the text from the original document. When the summary report is displayed you can use the check boxes to include or exclude sources from the report. In the detailed report the check boxes are converted to radio buttons which you can use to switch between sources. At point 4) the report is displayed. This can be the summary or the detailed version, depending on the choice at point 2). The summary shows what parts of the uploaded document have similarities with the sources found. The detailed report gives an overview of similarities per source found. The first illustration on this page shows a summary, while the second shows a detailed report. 6