Announcing the new My St. Kate's Portal!
On Monday, April 7, IT will be rolling out a personalized portal that will run in parallel to the Faculty/Staff and Student pages for two weeks before we redirect traffic solely to the new portal. On April 22, the new Portal will fully replace the Faculty/Staff and Student pages.
What is the portal? It's a personalized view into St. Kate’s that you can adjust to meet your needs. The simple starting point is it presents all the links from the existing Faculty/Staff page into organized topics called cards. The cards can be reorganized or hidden based on what you want to see. Some cards show you personalized data, such as your paystub, your vacation/leave accruals, or for students their DegreeWorks degree progress. Over time, more and more cards will appear to further personalize your our page for easier access to the information you need most.
Here is a peek at what you can expect to see:
Grammarly Authorship
You probably already know Grammarly, which is a writing assistance tool that offers grammar and style suggestions. Grammarly also now includes a feature called “Authorship” that could be of great interest to faculty who want a means of tracking how a student’s written works were produced, especially in this age of Generative AI.
When Authorship is enabled by a writer (such as a student), it tracks and categorizes where the text came from - whether it was typed by the author, copied and pasted from a particular website (e.g., Wikipedia or ChatGPT), or copied and pasted from an unknown source (like a private browsing window, though it also seems to categorize autocomplete text this way). It will also indicate whether text was typed then modified by Grammarly, or pasted from an outside source then modified by the user. Note that currently, the tool only works in Google Docs, so instructors who want to require it for assignments need to clearly inform students to use Google Docs and to enable Authorship before they begin to write.
Once the writing is complete, users can generate a report that uses color coding to indicate how different portions of the document were produced. Instructors can require students to share that report along with their document as a way to better determine whether and to what extent the document was written by the student. In addition, instructors who may want to experiment with allowing students to use Generative AI in various ways can use this tool as a way to gain better insight into how they did so.
This tool could be a valuable way for instructors and writing support staff to help students become better writers. As a guardrail against possible plagiarism, especially Generative AI use, it’s not foolproof, of course, as a student could simply hand-type text that comes from another source. But that extra effort will discourage some students who otherwise may be tempted to abuse Generative AI, and when combined with Turnitin AI Detection can help identify potential sources of concern.
To learn more about enabling and using the tool, see “Introducing Grammarly Authorship” on the Grammarly website. You can also reach out to an instructional designer.