Turnitin at Oxford

Have you experienced the problem that students submit their assignments in WebLearn, but red alert messages appear and the originality reports are never returned in WebLearn?

WebLearn is integrated with the external Turnitin service (http://submit.ac.uk). Classes and assignments are created behind the scenes in Turnitin, and student papers are submitted there via the WebLearn Assignments tool. There are three places where a problem may occur with the WebLearn-Turnitin integration, plus other issues to check (see  point 4 below):

1. Creation of the class in Turnitin – this happens when the WebLearn maintainer creates a new assignment and saves it. If you see a red alert message when trying to save an assignment, do not ignore it! It means that the creation of the corresponding class in Turnitin has failed, and originality reports will not be returned. (See flowchart below as to what to do about it.)
2. Syncronisation of the class roster between WebLearn and Turnitin – this may fail if there are people in the WebLearn site with external accounts, who have not entered their first name, last name or email address. This may cause all submissions from the site to fail. (See flowchart below as to what to do about it.)
3. Upload of student papers – if a red alert message appears alongside a single student’s name, the file that they submitted may be too large, or of an unacceptable file type. There may also be problems within a PDF file, such as text embedded as images, or embedded fonts from a package such as LaTeX. (See flowchart below as to what to do about it.)
4. Other things to check:

• The title of the WebLearn site must be longer than 5 characters
• Do not use the ‘Duplicate assignment’ facility in WebLearn – this may cause a problem with duplicate assignment titles in Turnitin
• Do not use an assignment title previously used in the same WebLearn site – this may cause a problem with duplicate assignment titles in Turnitin

Please see this flowchart for more details about what to do in the above situations:
Turnitin Originality Reports not being generated_flowchart

Contact the WebLearn team at weblearn@it.ox.ac.uk if you have any questions about your particular WebLearn assignment.

[Posted on Tuesday 25 March: Meeting cancelled due to other commitments by central authorities and therefore nothing new to report. Please see the separate posting providing feedback from the national Turnitin User Group meeting held in Birmingham on 12 February 2014]

Turnitin User Group meeting: Booking is required

Wednesday 26 March, 2:00 – 4:00 pm, followed by refreshments

IT Services, 13 Banbury Road

Join us to find out about the various avenues available for using the plagiarism awareness software Turnitin. Philippa O’Connor (Deputy Head: Education Policy) will report on the progress on work packages commissioned by Education Committee. Jill Fresen (WebLearn team) will report back on the national iParadigms user group meeting held in Birmingham in February.

There will be time for questions and discussion. We hope you will be able to come along and look forward to seeing you there.

Join the Turnitin User Group site in WebLearn – it offers a collection of resources and will add you to the group e-mail list: https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/info/plag/tiiug. Audio recordings of previous meetings are also available on this site.

Turnitin service may be intermittently unavailable during a scheduled maintenance period on Saturday, 15 March 2014, from 14:00 to 18:00 GMT. 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 to fall either before or at least  several hours after the scheduled maintenance  window.

Message from iParadigms, the Turnitin vendors:

Turnitin and Turnitin UK services may be intermittently unavailable during a scheduled maintenance period on Saturday, March 1, 2014 from 7-11AM U.S. Pacific Time (15:00 – 19:00 GMT).
Instructors are encouraged to modify assignment due dates either before or at least several hours after the scheduled maintenance window.

As a reminder, maintenance periods may occur the 1st and 3rd Saturday of the month as described on our System Status page.

Aston University, Birmingham, 12 February 2014

The CEO Chris Caren apologised unreservedly for the outage which occurred during December 2013. He explained that it was an unacceptable incident, and was due to human error – an undersized database machine had been mistakenly deployed which was unable cope when a number of large batch jobs were submitted in a short amount of time. The company has now appointed a new, experienced data base administrator, as well as system monitoring tools and queueing technology to process submitted papers immediately after an outage. Users are encouraged to subscribe to an upcoming real-time system status page and alerts; the email and twitter lists are going to become ‘opt-out’ instead of ‘opt-in’. Users present at the meeting called for less change and not in the middle of an academic term, together with more warning and better communication.

Will Murray (Senior Vice President, and CEO if iParadigms Europe) said that there will be more information on their website, all known issues will be in a ‘known issues’ log on the status page and linked to the email and twitter feeds. The feedback tab in Turnitin (User Voice) provides details of their planned upgrades (1.5 years ahead), release notes and bug reports. Release notes are now emailed to the email list as well as being available on the website. Users are encouraged to sign up for the live ‘Tech Talks’ (webinars) which are offered quarterly. There is a publicly available product blog and they are working to bring all the online help materials in one place. They are working on planning and developing the new ‘NextGen’ product and will run a parallel beta version over the summer.

Releases that took place in 4^th quarter, 2013:

• colour printing of Originality Report
• grading forms (simpler than rubrics) – categories and comments
• accept and mark Powerpoint files (Excel coming in April 2014)
• iPad (grade anywhere) – they will also support Windows and Android. Note that students can’t submit via iPad
• LTI 1.1 launched: they are implementing the standard and it is the chosen route forward.
      – the Sakai community has since confirmed that LTI (2.0) has been launched, including via Sakai.
      – IT Services (Oxford) is investigating a pilot project using Turnitin LTI. This will appear as a ‘new tool’ in WebLearn, taking users into the direct Turnitin interface, with more options available, such as anonymous marking and PeerMark.
      – a full set of LTI implementation manuals is available from the submit.ac.uk website
• iPad pin code to protect grades
• improvements to the login page and workflow

Releases planned for February 2014:

• allow any file type (turn it on in the admin settings – ‘allow any file type’) – accept images,  e.g. photo of student’s paper (submitted from student’s phone). This is mainly all for marking – can’t do originality check on all these files.
• increase file size (currently 20 Mb) (Sept2014) – for whole PhD and video files
• grading without submissions, e.g. performance, presentation etc – you get a grading template
• pre-written rubrics to reuse
• import rubrics (from Excel)

Releases planned for March 2014

• class segmentation (meta information about a class)
• road map will be available in the document viewer

*******************

Tips:
1. new ‘Grade Anywhere’ video demos will be launched within two weeks
2. You can use voice recognition software to dictate and save your Quick Marks
*******************
 
Will Murray: What’s next?
1. Update on agile software development process – going very well:
Unfiltered   →  Funnel   →   Program (‘trains’) – all in User Voice   →   Road Map   →   Live
2. iParadigms will make staff available to tour UK institutions to hear about their needs, especially in terms of policy.
3. Implement IMS LTI 2.0 by summer 2015

Existing User Group requests (under investigation)
• double blind marking (is scheduled)
• exclude footnotes from being matched in the OR
• separate release of feedback from release of grades
• download audio feedback
• notification of late submissions
• email non-submitters

Next Gen aspirations
• 6 months beta over second half of 2014 – can opt in during mid-2014
• go live in northern hemisphere in mid-2015
• touchable – touch screens
• responsive – size of interface – resize for different devices
• theme-able – look like the VLE integration
• new Document Viewer and all the rest of the TII UK interface (which they call the CMS)
• folders, offline, drafts
• multiple instructors per class
• increased admin controls
• integrations – share code with TII UK

Grading spaces
• each tutor gets their own marking area
• associate different rubrics with different spaces
• leave comments for moderators
• create a quick mark and place it on more than one grading space
• can offer combined view to students (or not) (e.g. Tutor1 quick marks, and Tutor2 quick marks)

Other improvements
• more integrated OR and GradeMark – put comments on OR, filtered by tutor, and associated voice comments (layers)
• can hide the Similarity Index while marking

This biennial event will take place in Newcastle-upon-Tyne from 16 to 18 June 2014.

The keynote speakers are:

• Dan Ariely – Professor of Psychology and Behavioural Economics at Duke University
• Adrian Slater – Solicitor and Head of Legal Services at the University of Leeds
• Tricia Bertram Gallant – Academic Integrity Coordinator at the University of California
• Will Murray – Senior Vice President Product and International at Turnitin.

The call for papers, posters and workshops is now open. Early bird conference registration closes on 31 March 2014.

Useful links:

• Conference website: http://plagiarismconference.org/
• Call for papers/posters: http://www.plagiarismconference.org/call-for-papers#conference-process

In early January Turnitin will be making two small changes that may impact workflow for instructors and students.

First, the sign in fields will be removed from the top of the submit.ac.uk website, and replaced with a Log In button. After clicking the new Log In button you will go to a login page to enter your credentials. Learn more about it.

The submission workflow will be modified to cater for new file types. Turnitin’s accepted file types now include files that may have little or no text (such as PowerPoint presentations). After uploading a file, a processing screen will be shown briefly, followed by a formatted image preview of the file. Then the user will confirm the submission and be shown a digital receipt. Learn more about it.

Please see the announcement below from TurnitinUSA about scheduled Turnitin maintenance time on Saturday 21 December. Being out of term time and close to Christmas, it should hopefully not affect use of Turnitin at Oxford University.

“Turnitin service may be intermittently unavailable during a scheduled maintenance period on Saturday, December 21st, 2013, from 7 to 11 AM U.S. Pacific Time (click for local time). An announcement will appear for users within Turnitin in advance of when the system will be unavailable for this scheduled maintenance.

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“