We have been using Turnitin for formative use for some time. This allows students, researchers and tutors to make textual comparisons between their own work and texts found on the Turnitin database. They can use this to establish that they have cited and referenced their work correctly.
We currently do not have an academic policy to either:
- accept essay submissions for summative assessments through an online dropbox
- submit essay submissions to Turnitin to check for similarities with other work on their database
Nevertheless we have been exploring technical solutions for such a time that we do.
We have developed a plugin based on Dan Marsden‘s (of CatalystIT) Turnitin-Moodle integration. On top of its current functionality we also allow tutors to manually sync Turnitin comparison scores.
This allows them to exclude texts to make comparisons against and to have this decision reflected in Moodle:
[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/74728263[/vimeo]
We have also extended it to integrate Grademark with the Moodle assignment in the following ways:
- We return Grademark grades
- Tutors release all grades together (manually or by pre-setting the release date)
- Students get a link to Grademark feedback
[vimeo]https://vimeo.com/74722265[/vimeo]
Technical changes:
- Assignments in Turnitin are created at the same time as they are created in Moodle rgather than when a student uploads a file
- We pass have the concept of a release date and pass this to Turnitin/Grademark
We are aware that there are other plugins and even more around the corner. We have also heard that the Turnitin API might be changing. Nevertheless we thought this might be worth exploring and putting forward as a desirable model to follow.
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