Studiosity service

Studiosity is an online service for all Birkbeck undergraduate and postgraduate students on taught programmes. It gives you assignment feedback and access to live online tutorials.

Studiosity is completely free and always available. You can use the service up to six times if you study part-time, and eight times if you study full-time, in each academic year. It can be used for either writing feedback or live online tutorials, or a combination of both.

Last academic year, Birkbeck students used Studiosity over 8500 times and 94% rated it 4 out of 5 or better.

What Studiosity provides

• Writing feedback on assignments before you submit them, provided within 24 hours by a specialist in academic writing - focusing on key elements such as structure, language, grammar and punctuation. The feedback does not cover subject-level content, but will help you get your assignment into shape so your ideas can shine through. You can submit a sample of your writing up to 8,000 words.
• 30-minute online tutorials (Connect Live) where you will work through an academic problem with a tutor until you figure it out. Subjects areas covered are:
  • English language issues
  • maths, biology, chemistry, physics, economics and business studies (all at foundational level)
  • basic, first-year undergraduate statistics, economics and accounting
  • Connect Live tutors will also help you with academic referencing if you can tell them what style your lecturer would like you to use.
• Studiosity helps with academic writing and problem solving. It is not a proofreading service nor a substitute for attending online learning activities and making the most of the support offered by academic, learning development and administrative staff.

Making the most of Studiosity

How to make the most of Writing Feedback

• Start using Studiosity for your first assignment onwards so you can incorporate the feedback when you are preparing future assignments.
• Consider how many assignments you will have across the term. If you have three essays to write, for example, you want to use a Studiosity interaction to get feedback on each one.
• Usually, you should only submit an assignment draft once to Studiosity. If lots of errors are highlighted, and you don’t have many other assignments over the course of the year, then you might want to edit the document to incorporate the feedback and then resubmit it to Studiosity. This is comparatively rare though.

Please note: We are unable to offer you any more interactions once you have used up your allocation.

• Studiosity will highlight an error the first or second time it occurs but thereafter will expect you to go through the document and correct any further errors yourself. Therefore, you will get the most feedback on the earlier part of the document.
• Studiosity promises to return writing feedback within 24 hours. So try to upload a draft of your assignment at least 30 hours before your deadline so you can implement the valuable advice and feedback you will receive.

How to make the most of Connect Live

You will receive the transcript of your session so use this to feed into your learning development, but don’t rely on that alone to help you in future. If you were assisted to work through a tricky maths problem, find other examples of the same type of problem so you can practise. If you have requested some help on an academic referencing problem, make notes about the solution in your own words. Although the advice in the transcript might be readily understandable after your Connect Live session, the take-home messages might not be so clear after the passage of time.

You will be able to access your Writing Feedback reports and transcripts of Connect Live sessions throughout the academic year, so these will be an ongoing source of reference and support. After each Connect Live or Writing Feedback interaction, figure out what you can take forward for your future academic work and jot down some notes.

What Studiosity will not do

• Studiosity cannot comment on the content, or subject matter, of your writing: Studiosity’s feedback is provided by academically-qualified staff, but not necessarily specialists in your subject area. In contrast, your lecturers at Birkbeck are research-intensive and often international experts in their field, so they are best placed to comment on your subject matter.

Whatever you do - make sure you use it! You can’t carry over an allocation of Studiosity to next year - it resets at the beginning of each year.