Turnitin at Oxford

News from turnitin.com:
“With just a touch of the finger you can quickly give students rich, meaningful feedback:
– View Originality Reports to ensure academic integrity
– Avoid writing repetitive comments with preset QuickMark® sets
– Customize text comments and general comments
– Add a voice comment for more personalized feedback
– Set expectations and grade faster with interactive rubrics”
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You must have a Turnitin instructor account through IT Services at Oxford University to use Turnitin for iPad.
Request a Turnitin instructor account by emailing turnitin at IT Services, stating your credentials and your intended use. The Turnitin licence allows only the work of registered Oxford students to be submitted.
More information: http://turnitin.com/en_us/features/ipad

We are pleased to announce the date for the next Turnitin User Group meeting. It will be held on Friday 11 Oct (Week 0), from 14:00 – 16:00, at IT Services, 13 Banbury Road.

Please book a place at the meeting – booking opens 30 days in advance of the event. On the booking page, you can express an interest and you will be emailed when booking opens.

We will keep the meeting informal, in the sense of sharing ideas and best practice with each other. Please contact turnitin@it.ox.ac.uk if you would like to have 10 minutes to describe how you and your department use Turnitin, and to highlight any issues for questions and discussion.

• Do use the Turnitin User Group mailing list (tii-community@weblearn.ox.ac.uk) for any questions and discussion at any time
• There are support sites for staff and students in WebLearn, containing lots of resources:
  * Staff support site: https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/info/plag
  * Student support site: https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/skills/plag

The University’s Central Administration has made the funds available to purchase another 3-year licence for the use of Turnitin, including the associated products GradeMark and PeerMark. Our thanks go to the University, as well as those who negotiated with the suppliers and concluded the contract.

The new licence runs from 1 August 2013 to 31 July 2016.

Please contact turnitin@it.ox.ac.uk to request an instructor account on TurnitinUK if you do not already have one and if you need to use the Turnitin direct service. You can also enable Turnitin via the Assignments tool in WebLearn, which obviates the need for a separate instructor account. The same email address may be used to request consultation and support in the use of Turnitin.

There is information About Turnitin at http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/turnitin and the Service Level Description may be found at http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/internal/sld/turnitin.xml

Keep an eye on courses.it.ox.ac.uk for courses about Plagiarism and the use of Turnitin – check the course catalogue under ‘P’ for Plagiarism.

From the USA Turnitin providers:

“Turnitin service may be intermittently unavailable  during a scheduled maintenance period on Saturday, August 10th, from 7 to  11 AM Pacific Time  (http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Turnitin+Maintenance+Period&iso=20130810T07&p1=224&ah=4). 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.

Providing a fast, reliable and secure service is something that Turnitin takes seriously. Stay current with Turnitin’s system status, performance, security, and scheduled maintenance updates via the new Turnitin System Status page:  http://turnitin.com/en_us/support/system-status“

[image credit: http://www.squidoo.com/free-online-teaching-tools#module147349431]

From Kathryn Black, Educational Development Co-ordinator, Oxford Learning Institute:
“A new resource has been published on the Oxford Learning Institute website: Preventing plagiarism: promoting good writing. I hope you will find it interesting to read this page and you will promote it to anyone who might like to look at it or use its advice to help their students.”

Web: www.learning.ox.ac.uk

[image credit: Times Higher Education, 20 June 2013]

We have often heard about the different perceptions that international students might have about what is considered to be plagiarism in Western universities. Until now, I have had only a vague notion that in ‘some cultures’, it is considered desirable to reproduce the words of the master or the expert. I did not really understand the extent or ramifications of this philosophy until I read this article in The Times Higher Education about the way supervisors and students work in academia in Japan: ‘Stick to the master plan’ (Times Higher Education, 20 June 2013).

On more than one occasion, we have received unsolicited emails from ‘volunteers’ offering “Free plagiarism checking websites for students and teachers”. In one case, on closer investigation, we found that the sender works for a professional essay writing service. Submitting an essay for a free plagiarism check is quite likely to result in the same essay being sold via an ‘essay mill’ service. Depending on the order of events, this could lead to an Oxford student’s essay of faultless originality being flagged as 100% plagiarised when it is finally submitted to Turnitin.

It is important that Oxford students should be strongly warned against falling victim to such offers. Students should only submit their essays to services sanctioned by Oxford University, namely WebLearn and Turnitin (via their tutor, supervisor or departmental administrator).  We plan to use this poster on WebLearn pages and the student plagiarism support site, and have requested that it be made available on the Student Gateway.

 
Students consult a variety of sources in their academic writing, such as academic sites, social sites and electronic encyclopaedias (e.g. wikipedia). In today’s electronic age, some unscrupulous students even use ‘cheat’ sites that sell custom essays. The Turnitin providers created a rubric to evaluate the credibility of online sites, and then conducted a study using the rubric to evaluate 197 sources. The resulting interactive website is very informative and useful (see more details below.)

From the blog at turnitin.com – “Explore the ratings for top student sources”:

“Turnitin created a new interactive website, “Ratings for Top Student Sources,” which ranks the most popular online sources found in student papers.

Turnitin partnered with a team of educators who scored the online sources most frequently used by secondary and higher education students in six categories: academic, social media, paper mills, encyclopedias, news/portals, and shopping sites. The educators used the Source Educational Evaluation Rubric (SEER) to rate 197 sources on the level of their authority, educational value, intent, originality, and quality. Visitors to the interactive site can set their viewing preferences using combinations of these attributes.”

The following study has been published by the journal Research in Learning Technology:

Graham-Matheson, L. & Starr, S. (2013). Is it cheating or learning the craft of writing? Using Turnitin to help students avoid plagiarism. Research in Learning Technology, 21: 17218.

The authors make the following conclusions:

“The results of the study suggest that Turnitin is seen as a useful tool by students and may help up to half of students to avoid plagiarising, particularly the less confident students. There was a general understanding of the University’s reasons for using Turnitin and staff as a basis for helping students to avoid plagiarism valued it. The originality reports were seen to be very useful in discussions with students, particularly those having problems understanding plagiarism and academic writing requirements. Although the research was set up to assess the extent of the formative use of Turnitin, not its impact, it was clear, particularly from the interviews with academic staff, that Turnitin is a valuable tool in teaching students to understand, and avoid, plagiarism.”

The Turnitin Academy is offering the following free online courses over the summer:

• Originality, Plagiarism and the Web
• Best Practices for Teaching with Turnitin
• Faster, Easier Grading with Grademark Rubrics

See the full Turnitin Academy Newsletter for more details, webinars and other events.