The University has teamed up with Studiosity to bring you an online service that can help you improve your academic writing skills. This is important for you because we think this may help improve your grades for written assessments.
Studiosity will allow you to upload almost complete drafts of your essays, reports and other written assessment types. The drafts are reviewed by experts in academic writing and detailed feedback, explaining how your work can be improved will be sent to you. You can expect to receive feedback within 24 hours (up to 72 hours at busy times).
What does the feedback cover?
- Feedback will cover:
- Spelling and grammar
- Document structure
- Use of language
- Argument development
- Referencing
Feedback is not subject specific. This means that design students (for example) will not get feedback on their design ideas and literature students will not get feedback on their literary criticism. The feedback is purely about the quality or your writing and covers the points listed above.
Who is providing the feedback?
Feedback is provided by online tutors. They may not be based in the UK, but they are based in locations around the world where British English is spoken. This means the service is available 24/7. The online tutors are not subject specialists, but they are experts in academic writing.
Connect Live
Studiosity also has a feature called 'Connect Live', which is a live chat service that connects you to an advisor who can help with study skills specific to a particular discipline, leaving the subject matter expertise in the hands of your tutors. The advisor can't help you with your overall assignment, essay question, or formulas, but they can help with the basic principles of maths, chemistry, physics, business studies and other subjects, as well as giving you feedback on your academic writing. They can help unblock a quick problem or point you in the right direction back at the university for more help.
How do I find Studiosity?
Go to your module page on Moodle and look for the link. It looks like this:
When you click the link, you will be taken to the homepage. Just choose a PIN, agree to the terms of use and continue to your account. Important: make a note of your PIN because you'll need to enter it each time you use Studiosity. This is to help protect your privacy. Once you've activated your account, you may find it easier to use the Studiosity app on your phone or tablet.
Limitations of the service
Each student may use the service up to 8 times during the academic year (you start the year with 8 Studiosity credits). That means you can get one feedback report on 8 different essays/reports, or you could get two or more feedback reports on one piece of work as you improve it, the choice is yours.
If you're not sure how best to use your 8 Studiosity credits, ask your module tutor for advice but we recommend you keep some for end of year submissions.
Each draft essay/report submitted for feedback must be no more than 5,500 words. However, if your written assessment is longer than this, you can always split it. For example, a 10,000-word assessment could be uploaded in two halves, using two of your Studiosity credits.
Other than that, you're free to use Studiosity whenever and however you need it.
Further Help and Guidance
This walkthrough video demonstrates how Studiosity is used by students and shows you an example of the kind of feedback you can expect. The Writing Feedback FAQ contains answers to frequent questions about the service.
There is also a lot of useful material available at the Studiosity YouTube Channel.
Who to contact
If you need advice about how to get the most from the service and how best to use your 10 credits, talk to your module tutor in the first instance.
If you're having a technical problem or your module tutor is unable to help, use the customer support chat feature but if that doesn't help, please contact your school Teaching and Learning Lead.
If you are a tutor and you need help making the link appear in Moodle, please contact itservicedesk@gre.ac.uk
Privacy notice for Studiosity
The University of Greenwich processes the following personal data about you if you opt to use the Studiosity service:
- First name, last name, email address
- Course
- Student ID
- Content of your interactions with Studiosity tutors
Studiosity may also create data, and share this information with the University of Greenwich, about students who may benefit from additional study or wellbeing support by the university based solely on the evidence provided above. Studiosity have no access to any other any university records.
The retention period for this data is 14 months after you stop using the service, after which usage data is anonymised. Retention periods are based on our retention schedule.
We process this personal data about you for the following reasons:
- To monitor usage of the service and plan for service development in the future
- Providing access to the Studiosity service while you are an eligible Greenwich student
Studiosity is an independent data controller based in Australia. In opting to use the Studiosity service you are entering into an individual agreement with Studiosity, subject to their terms and conditions.
Information on Studiosity's policies on privacy and security can be found at: http://studiosity.com/connect/policy_agreements/5/privacy
Studiosity augment their service with a feature known as Citation Assist, which uses a third-party to check whether text uploaded to Studiosty may need referencing. No personal data is shared with this third party, and your work is only shared temporarily with them for the purpose of checking for references. This feature is not related to the university's use of Turnitin or plagiarism regulations in any way. For more information please refer to: https://support.studiosity.com/en/collections/291399-writing-feedback#citation-assist
We rely on the following legal basis/bases for processing the data:
- Public task
You can find out more information about this by looking at our Data Processing Activities Register: https://docs.gre.ac.uk/rep/vco/data-processing-activities-register
You have rights as a Data Subject. You can see more information about those rights on our website: https://www.gre.ac.uk/about-us/governance/information-compliance/policy To contact Peter Garrod, the University of Greenwich Data Protection Officer and University Secretary, please email: compliance@gre.ac.uk