Turnitin at Oxford

We enjoyed an excellent session last week on the use of Grademark which was presented here at OUCS by Garry Maguire, Senior Lecturer EAP and Oxford Brookes University Teaching Fellow. He has been using it for some time to provide feedback to over 400 students and reported high levels of student satisfaction.

Garry also informed us that he and some his fellow lecturers at Oxford Brookes have been using Jing or Camtasia to record voice feedback commentary to accompany the Grademark comments. This method may now be superseded by the introduction of Voice comments as part of Grademark. Here is a communication from Turnitin about them.

Instructors now have the ability to leave a voice comment in GradeMark to give students additional substantive feedback that is clear, engaging, and easy to understand.

With just a few clicks, instructors can quickly record a detailed voice message and attach it to a paper. This new GradeMark feature is especially useful in disciplines where written assignments are graded primarily on content vs. writing skills (such as science lab reports). Additionally, for those who teach ELL students, adding a voice comment gives you the opportunity to more fully explain your feedback.

With voice comments, students can hear the content of the message, and more importantly, the context of the feedback and tone of the instructor’s voice.

Help Center | How to Leave a General Text or Voice Comment
Webcast | More Than Words: Using Voice Comments to Provide Effective Feedback
What’s New | Learn More About New Features

TurnitinUK is experiencing an intermittent issue that impacts
integrations. This may affect Weblearn Assignment submissions which use the Turnitin option.

iParadigms are working to resolve this and will provide
updates.

The Turnitin User Group site in WebLearn is located at https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/info/plag/tiiug. It is a joinable site, open to all.

Joining/Leaving the WebLearn site
There is a link on the site Home Page to join the site. On joining, you become a member, will receive emails sent to the mailing list (see below), will be able to participate in Forum discussions, and the site will appear in your “My Active Sites”. If you wish to leave the site, you can do so via Site Info > Leave this site.

Site Members
The Site Members tool displays a list of all members of the site.

Mailing List
The address of the mailing list for the Turnitin User Group is: tii-community@weblearn.ox.ac.uk. Its purpose is SITE-WIDE communication, so note that all messages sent to this address will go to all site members.

You need to join the site (see above) in order to send messages to this list.

Forums
We have set up a Forum with topics for us to continue the discussion about issues and questions to take to the Proctors and Education Committee. There are topics for each group to continue their discussion, a topic for additional contributions from those who could not attend yesterday’s meeting, and a place for us to develop a consolidated list.

Resources
There is a folder for Group notes and presentations from the face-to-face meeting. There is also a folder to share any teaching and training materials that we may have about avoiding plagiarism and using Turnitin.

Let’s make it a vibrant site with ongoing discussions and sharing of ideas and resources.

The inaugural meeting of the Oxford University Turnitin User Group was held at OUCS on 30 April 2012. We plan to hold a face-to-face meeting once per term. Look out for it on the Courses database where booking will open 30 days prior to each event:
http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/courses/detail/TTEP

See the next post about the Turnitin User Group site in WebLearn and tools for sharing and communicating.

 (Image credit: French School (15th century), Bridgeman Education, Image no. XIR192862)

Dr Catherine Walter, University Lecturer in Applied Linguistics and Fellow of Linacre College is a member of the Turnitin User Group. She found and translated this very apt piece. It could help students understand a little more about how to avoid plagiarism:

‘Bees pillage the flowers here and there, but then they make honey of them, and this is all theirs; it is no longer thyme or marjoram: likewise pieces borrowed from others:  the author transforms them and blends them, to make a work that is all his own,  according to his critical judgment: his education, his work and his studies all aim at forming that judgment.’     (Catherine’s translation)

Original:

Les abeilles pillotent deci dela les fleurs : mais elles en font aprez le miel, qui est tout leur : ce n’est plus thym, ny mariolaine : ainsi les pieces empruntees d’aultruy, il les transformera et confondra pour en faire un ouvrage tout sien, a Savoir son iugement : son institution , son travail et estude ne vise qu’i le former. 
(from Full text of “Essais de Michel de Montaigne avec les notes de tous les commentateurs”, approx. 1575) Available at http://www.archive.org/stream/essaisdemicheld00montgoog/essaisdemicheld00montgoog_djvu.txt

We shall be holding our inaugural Turnitin User Group meeting on 30th April at 2pm at OUCS.

Topics will include:

• setting the terms of reference for the Turnitin User Group  in response to users’ input
• a report on a meeting with the Proctors’ Office regarding Institutional guidance on the use of Turnitin
• latest developments  around Turnitin integration in WebLearn

Come and let your voice be heard…

Booking can be made here

The use of Turnitin at Oxford University continues to grow, both by using the direct Turnitin UK submissions system, and through the Assignments tool in WebLearn.

We now have approx 143 Turnitin Instructor accounts; 30 new ones were created during HT2012. Around a third of all submissions to Turnitin were via WebLearn, and these are on the increase. In the last 12 months (Feb 2011 to Feb 2012), there have been 4544 submissions to Turnitin, of which 2156 have been via WebLearn, i.e. 47.44%.

See Melissa Highton’s blog post for more information on the support offered to staff and students by the Learning Technologies Group: http://blogs.it.ox.ac.uk/melissa/2012/03/10/is-it-catching/

Watch this space for more information about OUCS courses on the avoidance of plagiarism and the use of Turnitin.