Turnitin at Oxford

[This blog post is directed to members of Oxford University]

We are working towards clarifying plagiarism policies and the use of Turnitin at the university. One of the most helpful things is to talk to others from other faculties and schools, and compare notes. The Turnitin User Group is a perfect place to do so – both in the online WebLearn site, and the face-to-face meetings that are held once per term: see https://courses.it.ox.ac.uk/detail/TTEP

Link to Turnitin User Group site:
https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/portal/hierarchy/info/plag/tiiug/

There is a new forum for us to post important questions that we need to take further – see image below. In the Forums tool on the site, click on the topic of your choice and then ‘Start a New Conversation’ in order to make your voice heard.

Please post your questions in the Forums tool in the User Group site listed above. We can then take up a consolidated list  of questions with decision makers in the university. Thanks in anticipation for your input and ideas.

The Turnitin service may be intermittently unavailable during a scheduled maintenance period on Saturday, 11 October 2014, from 15:00 to 19:00 BST.

An announcement will appear for users within Turnitin in advance of when the system will be unavailable for this scheduled maintenance. This maintenance will affect Turnitin and TurnitinUK users.

Instructors are encouraged to modify assignment due dates either before or at least several hours after the scheduled maintenance window.

Thank you for working with us as we improve Turnitin.

Sincerely,
The Turnitin Team

www.turnitin.com

The Turnitin Academy provides a link to various highlights of the 6th Integrity and Plagiarism Conference held in Newcastle-upon-Tyne from 16-18 June 2014. The highlights include extensive blog posts and a summary of social media activity.

The same newsletter also include details of the Educator Spotlight, and links to a collection of recorded webcasts on a variety of topics to do with plagiarism and academic writing.

Starting July 1, 2014, Turnitin will no longer support Internet Explorer (IE8) browsers and we will no longer test or fix features and bugs found in Internet Explorer 8. This does not mean that Turnitin will immediately stop working in IE8, however we will be employing more modern browser capabilities such as HTML 5 that do not work with IE8.

We recommend that Internet Explorer 8 users upgrade or move to a current version of one of these free, supported industry standard browsers:

– Chrome: http://www.google.com/chrome

– Firefox: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/

– Safari: http://www.apple.com/safari/

– Internet Explorer 9: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/internet-explorer-9-details.aspx

This was originally announced in December 2013 and notifications for users accessing Turnitin in IE8 have been notified upon logging in.

At Turnitin, we are continually improving the experience of providing rich feedback on student work. With this change Turnitin will be able to move forward towards full compatibility with the touchscreen capabilities of browsers for document interaction (leaving marks and comments).

Sincerely,

The Turnitin Product Team

www.turnitin.com

Follow us on Twitter: @TurnitinProduct

Interpreting the originality reports that are generated from Turnitin is an art, and requires some insight into the subject matter, the nature of the assessment task that was set, and the usual writing style and language skills of the student.

There are two key issues:

1. There is no ‘magic number’, i.e. although the similarity score is colour coded red-amber-blue-green, there is no magic threshold below which we can assume that all is in order, or above which we can suspect that plagiarism may have occurred. For various reasons, it is possible for an essay to yield a fairly high score and be simply in need of remediation, or conversely to yield a low score with text matches artificially ‘engineered out’.
2. No matter what the Turnitin score shows, the software is simply a text matching tool, and not a ‘plagiarism detection’ device. Expert human intervention and judgement is need to investigate and interpret the similarity score.

IT Services offers the following interventions to support academics and administrators in managing the use of Turnitin and interpreting the originality reports:

• Support site in WebLearn containing lots of help videos (see ‘Turnitin videos’ and ‘SIPA case studies’ – How an Oxford tutor uses Turnitin via WebLearn): https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/info/plag
• Courses on using Turnitin (directly or via WebLearn) and interpreting originality reports – see the Home page of the same support site
• Individual consultation: send email to Turnitin@it.ox.ac.uk
• This Turnitin blog to keep up to date: https://blogs.it.ox.ac.uk/tii/
• The mailing list (tii-community@weblearn.ox.ac.uk) in the Turnitin User Group site (https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/info/plag/tiiug) to share ideas and questions.

Please make use of the available channels for discussion and support.

The following information is provided on the Turnitin Help website:

Papers can now be submitted to Turnitin in the following 30 languages: Chinese (simplified and traditional), Japanese, Thai, Korean, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Norwegian (Bokmal, Nynorsk), Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Arabic, Greek, Hebrew, Farsi, Russian, and Turkish. Please note that Turnitin will match text between text of the same language. Therefore, there will be no matches to “translated” papers (unless your institution purchases this additional feature).

What does this mean?
A paper submitted in Spanish text is checked against the Turnitin Spanish text database which contains Spanish language papers and crawled Spanish language webpages.  If a paper is submitted in English (translated from Spanish), then it will be checked against the English database (not the Spanish database). Therefore there will be little to no matches to the original paper submitted in Spanish.
Also note, because our system is based on text character matching, if a paper is submitted as an image or copied from an image (ex. Google Books), the image does not register as text.  A match would not be detected since an image of text is not the same as actual text

News from Turnitin:

“Cloud Submit allows users to submit files to Turnitin assignments from Google Drive™ and Dropbox—two of the most widely used document storage services.”

Read more about it:
http://pages.turnitin.com/1013-cloud-submit.html

Watch a Demo Video:
http://turnitin.com/en_us/features/whats-new#cloud-submit