Full Sail University

Full Sail University’s mission is to “provide students with an innovative style of education delivered by a staff of dedicated individuals, that addresses the career opportunities available in an ever-growing, constantly evolving industry.” Immersive, fast-paced curricula are essential for delivering on this mission and preparing students for careers in the entertainment and media industry.

Accelerated courses are a heavy lift. Feedback Studio lightens the load.

Tools such as Turnitin Feedback Studio play an integral supporting role. Since 2011, Full Sail faculty have utilized Turnitin tools for grading, feedback, and plagiarism prevention. From 2012 to 2017, there were approximately 200,000 total assignment submissions and active student usage increased by nearly 70%. The value of feedback has also grown. In fact, in 2017 more than 35,000 student submissions received instructor comments. Full Sail faculty depend on Feedback Studio to help them provide their students with a comprehensive educational experience.

Colleen Cleveland teaches an online MFA course in Media Design and uses Feedback Studio in a variety of ways. Her course is in the accelerated program; she teaches a full course in just four weeks. This means that she needs to get quality feedback to her students as quickly as possible so they know where they stand and how to improve. As an instructor in such a fast-paced, rigorous program, Colleen’s need for clear, reliable tools that work as efficiently as she does is critical.

Support original student work. Concentrate on content, not grading.

Colleen values having a tool that emphasizes the importance of originality. “[Feedback Studio] helps with plagiarism and that is something you want to teach [students] early on. To give credit where credit is due.”

Turnitin also supports Colleen with the grind of constant grading. She found that using Feedback Studio takes care of the more time consuming tasks, such as checking grammar and sourcing quotes. This allows her more time to get to the core of a student’s work.

Colleen uses the e-rater grammar checker to assess the grammatical mechanics of her student’s papers, as well as the sources sidebar to see where her students are finding their sources and quotes.

“It’s nice to have something that will pick up the mechanics, pick up the quotes, and pick up all the little details… then allow you to concentrate more on the content.”

A video comment is worth a thousand words.

Using Feedback Studio has allowed Colleen to teach her students the importance of professional voice. This allows them to write not just for academic papers, but for a range of roles in the creative industry, from journalism to publishing.

Colleen guides her students in finding their voice with video recorded feedback. She’ll record herself using Feedback Studio to share with the students. This helps Colleen explain the results of the feedback directly.

“I can showcase [to the student] ‘This is what the computer picked up, but this is how I’m going to explain it to you so you don’t panic, you can learn from it, and you can [use it] to go on and actually improve yourself.’”