Photo credit Katherine Johnson. https://www.flickr.com/photos/aka_kath/3035341007/
The Turnitin user guides are on the move again! They can now be found at https://help.turnitin.com.
Information about Turnitin UK service is still to be found at https://www.turnitin.com/regions/uk
Recent articles (see below) have highlighted growing concern about students purchasing made-to-order essays and assignments from so-called ‘essay mills’ or ‘essay writing services’ and how universities need to raise awareness about the practice and the risks involved. The practice is known as ‘contract cheating’.
Oxford University has been aware of this practice for a number of years, and warns students by means of lunch-time awareness sessions, study skills websites and other support services (Oxford login required). Students are also warned not to seek free so-called ‘plagiarism checking’ services, which may be spurious (for example, resulting in stealing original work and selling it to others).
From January 2019, the providers of Turnitin will launch a new add-on product called Authorship Investigate. This tool makes use of forensic linguistics and machine learning to investigate a piece of student writing based on the student’s usual style, tone and other linguistic characteristics. As always, a software tool can only flag issues that may deserve further investigation and interpretation by experts in the field.
More information:
Turnitin will be unavailable between 4pm and 12am on Saturday 5th January. All submissions made through WebLearn during this period will be queued and processed once the maintenance is complete. It will not be possible to create a new assignment which routes essays via Turnitin during the maintenance window but it will be possible to retrospectively enable Turnitin once the window has closed.
It will not be possible to submit directly to Turnitin during the maintenance period.
Here’s the original note from Turnitin.
We’re just dropping you a note to inform you that the following Turnitin services will be unavailable on January 5th, 2019:
To ensure that services remain stable, particularly during high submission periods, this maintenance will include several hardware updates and performance improvements.
Is your time zone not listed? Click here to find out when you’ll be affected.
While we’d love to provide an uninterrupted service, our machines require a health check every now and again…
Users will be unable to submit and grade during this maintenance window, so please ensure that any grading or submission deadlines are adjusted to fall outside of the window.
Thanks for your patience!
Stay up to date with Turnitin system status by following @TurnitinStatus on Twitter.
Turnitin, LLC, 2101 Webster St. Suite 1800, Oakland, California 94612
Keen-eyed readers may note that www.turnitinuk.com now requires a login. Fear not as public content is still available via the follow two public URLs
[Added by Jill, 05/11/2018: In other words, one needs to go via turnitin.com to access training and support materials, not directly to www.turnitinuk.com]
We have just received this from Turnitin. WebLearn will queue all essay submissions and process them once the maintenance is complete.
No new assignments should be created whilst Turnitin is unavailable.
We’re just dropping you a note to let you know the following Turnitin services will be briefly unavailable on October 28, 2018:
To ensure that services remain stable, particularly during high submission periods, this micro maintenance (30 minutes) will include several hardware updates and performance improvements.
GMT Oct 28th 09:00 – 09:30
Is your time zone not listed? Click here to find out when you’ll be affected.
While we’d love to provide an uninterrupted service, our machines require a health check every now and again…
Users will be unable to submit and grade during this maintenance window, so please ensure that any submission deadlines are adjusted to fall outside of the window.
Thanks for your patience!
Stay up to date with Turnitin system status by following @TurnitinStatus on Twitter.
A message from Turnitin.
To clarify, during the maintenance period (Sept 22 4pm – 12:30am (Sept 23))
Dear Customers,
You may have noticed that some Turnitin customers recently experienced intermittent service interruptions or degradations. We apologize if you were one of the customers affected, and we are happy to report that our services are currently stable.
To prevent further issues of this nature, we will be performing some proactive emergency maintenance that will temporarily disrupt our services including:
PDT Sept 22 8am – 4:30pm
BST Sept 22 4pm – 12:30am (Sept 23)
AEST Sept 23 1am – 9:30am
Is your time zone not listed? Click here to find out when you’ll be affected.
Users will be unable to submit and grade during this maintenance window, so please ensure that any submission deadlines are adjusted to fall outside of the window.
Thanks for your understanding and continued support of Turnitin.
Stay up to date with Turnitin system status by following @TurnitinStatus on Twitter.
Turnitin have introduced a new “dynamic” status page which gives real-time information on the health of their systems. It also outlines any planned downtime. Be sure to check the Turnitin UK section (and not the general Turnitin area).
It maybe worth pointing out how a Turnitin outage affects users. There are two scenarios:
Outage of TurnitinUK will
Outage of TurnitinUK will affect both the submission of papers and the viewing of reports and scores.
These facilities will only be available once the service is restored.
Warning: Be careful not to set any WebLearn assignment ‘Due date’ and time (or ‘Accept Until’ date and time) during the following Turnitin downtime (if an assignment does close when Turnitin is unavailable, the Originality Report will fail to be generated…)
The following Turnitin services will be unavailable on July 10, 2018 from 16:00-00:00:
The Turnitin suppliers advise the following: “To ensure that services remain stable, particularly during high submission periods, this maintenance will include several hardware updates and performance improvements”.
A message from Turnitin about Feedback Studio improvements designed to help instructors help students learn with integrity.
Feedback Studio now offers:
For our secondary education customers, we’re thrilled to announce even more ways to integrate Feedback Studio into your curriculum.
As we continue to enhance the user experience for our Feedback Studio customers, keep an eye on our release notes and @TurnitinProduct Twitter feed for more information.
A note from Turnitin UK.
Please be aware that students will still be able to submit essays within WebLearn; the submission of work and the generation of reports will be queued by WebLearn and will be processed as soon as Turnitin is available again. The outage only affects the services when accessed directly using a web browser.
We’re just dropping you a note to let you know that the following Turnitin services will be unavailable on March 17, 2018:
To ensure that services remain stable, particularly during high submission periods, this maintenance will include several hardware updates and performance improvements.
When will services be unavailable?
PST March 17 8am – 2pm
GMT March 17 4pm – 10pm
AEST March 18 2am – 8am
How will you be affected?
While we’d love to provide an uninterrupted service, our machines require a health check every now and again…
Users will be unable to submit and grade during this maintenance window, so please ensure that any submission deadlines are adjusted to fall outside of the window.
Thanks for your patience!
