Turnitin at Oxford

WebLearn site maintainers are reminded that it is illegal to distribute or upload into WebLearn, any scanned or downloaded copies of copyrighted material (including books, journals and other publications, images, music and video) without obtaining permission/a licence to do so from the copyright owner. Prohibitions include emailing a copy of the work or extract, or sending it as an attachment, or uploading a copy of the work or extract on an intranet or Virtual Learning Environment like WebLearn. This applies even behind password protected sites such as those in WebLearn.

The University holds a licence that permits the sharing of scanned extracts (from print originals) with students enrolled on specified courses. Universities UK (UUK) and the Copyright Licensing Agency (CLA) are in the final stages of agreeing a new licence from August 2013 which is likely to include digital-to-digital as well as print-to-digital copying.

The files held on WebLearn could be audited by the CLA at any time, or could be searched by publishers, and you would be personally liable for breach of copyright or piracy. More information about copyright and the CLA can be found here: https://weblearn.ox.ac.uk/portal/hierarchy/info/copyright.

Consult this flowchart which explains more about copyright of print and digital materials and when it is necessary to seek permission from the rights holder.

Queries concerning the CLA License may be addressed to:
Charles Shaw, University Licensing Coordinator for Scanning under the CLA License, Secretary, Academic Services and University Collections, University Offices – charles.shaw@admin.ox.ac.uk; tel:(2)80563

Fostering a culture of honesty and academic integrity

Six webinars, six speakers, six weeks: Join these sessions offered by the UK support team, Plagiarism Advice.
Details are provided at http://plagiarismadvice.org/webinars

The IT Services Turnitin Service Level Description was updated today. The following changes were made:

• Updated all mention of OUCS to IT Services, and relevant links accordingly
• Updated Section 2.6 – Added links for more information on using the separate products iThenticate (for individual researchers) and Turnitin Admissions (for prospective students)
• Added Section 4 – Conditions for sub accounts and sub administrators
• Added Section 5 – Request for a Turnitin instructor account using a generic email address
• Added Section 6 – Change Log

The Service Level Description can be found at: http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/internal/sld/turnitin.xml

Please familiarise yourself with the changes, if they are relevant to your unit’s current or proposed use of Turnitin.

The latest Turnitin Academy Newsletter provides information on the following: (follow the link for more information and to register for the free webinars)

Closing the gap – What students say about instructor feedback. Key findings from the survey include:

• Despite high rates of electronic submission, students do not report receiving electronic feedback at the same rate.
• Students find feedback on “thesis/development” the most valuable, but report receiving more feedback on grammar/mechanics and composition/structure.
• Though 66.5 percent of students reported receiving “general, overall comments” on their paper, less than half of those students rated that feedback as “very helpful.”
• Forty-five percent of students rate voice/audio comments as helpful, but only 2.7 percent currently receive this type of feedback.
• Over 17 percent of students reported that their instructors would take more than 17 days to provide feedback on their papers.

Free UK-based webinars:

• Why Do Students Plagiarise? | May 22
• Identifying Plagiarism in Student Work | May 29
• Reducing Plagiarism through Assessment Design | Jun 5
• A Quick Guide to Referencing | Jun 12
• Using Electronic Sources | June 19
• Case Processing | Jun 26

User Events and Conferences

Access the newsletter link for all the information, including a schedule for online Basic Training Walkthroughs.

The University’s Turnitin licence allows only the work of registered Oxford students to be screened for text matching or possible instances of plagiarism. Academic staff and researchers need to use a separate product called iThenticate, run by the same company as Turnitin, if they wish to screen their own work prior to submission for publication.

Oxford University does not have a licence for the use of iThenticate. As an individual, you can buy credits on a sliding scale based on word count, starting at $50 for a single manuscript (max 25,000 words).

You will find all the information here: http://www.ithenticate.com

This article appears in the latest issue of the journal Research in Learning Technology:
“Is it cheating – or learning the craft of writing? Using Turnitin to help students avoid plagiarism” by Lynne Graham-Matheson and Simon Starr.
The article is open access and can be found here:
http://www.researchinlearningtechnology.net/index.php/rlt/article/view/17218

The authors conclude that “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.” (p. 11)

If you have any questions about using Turnitin, you can use the Oxford University Turnitin User Group mailing list to discuss them (send email to tii-community@weblearn.ox.ac.uk).

Contact IT Services ( tii@it.ox.ac.uk) if you require an instructor account to use TurnitinUK direct. Turnitin is integrated with the Assignments tool in WebLearn, which means that you don’t need a separate Turnitin account and students can submit their assignments via WebLearn.

Training offered by IT Services can be found in the courses catalogue (courses@it.ox.ac.uk) (under ‘P’ for ’plagiarism’).

If a student submits an essay/assignment that is to go through Turnitin (either via WebLearn or TurnitinUK direct), tracked changes should not be left on. The reason is that Turnitin will match everything in the deleted and formatted text, thus falsely inflating the similarity index.

Even if the tracked changes are not showing in the Word version of the document, Turnitin will still pick them up. Advise students to accept or reject all changes/edits in their document and switch off Track Changes before submitting it. If you require students to submit only PDF versions, then it is obvious when Track Changes has been left on.

After the fact, if Turnitin has matched deleted or formatted text, you can exclude those matches from the report as follows:

• Click on a particular match in the right hand pane
• Click on the black/white right arrow for more details
• Click on the button below: “Exclude Sources”
• Use the left arrow (on the upper red bar) to return to the Match Breakdown.

PeerMark is part of the Turnitin suite of software and provides a platform for students to evaluate each other’s work.

Some of the features of PeerMark include:

• When setting up a PeerMark assignment, options can be selected to allocate students to pairs or groups for marking each other’s papers.
• Instructors can create a set of free response and/or scale questions to guide students as they review their peer’s papers.
• Instructors see the student reviews displayed beside each paper.
• PeerMark allows for saving and sharing peer assessment questions. 
• Instructors have fine grained control over who will assess which paper.

Useful links:

• Training videos and tutorials provided by Turnitin
• Staff support site in WebLearn
• Turnitin User Group in WebLearn – use the site mailing address to discuss any issues with other Oxford University users

More information? Contact us at IT Services: turnitin@it.ox.ac.uk

GradeMark is part of the Turnitin suite of software and provides an electronic marking and commenting facility including the possibility of audio feedback to students. After comments are posted by the tutor, students can access GradeMark to review them and print or save a copy of the marked file.

Some of the features of GradeMark include:

• text highlighting and commenting, including colour-coded comments
• predefined sets of inline comments
• user-defined sets of inline comments, enabling tutors to create a one-click set for frequently-used comments
• space for general feedback and comments
• user-defined rubrics – the rubric tool offers several options for setting the calculation of marks (by score or percentages)
• voice recording of feedback to students

One Oxford tutor found GradeMark intuitive to use for the following reasons:

1. ease of submitting the essays;
2. the method for adding comments and how they appear on the script is much neater than other methods;
3. has been popular with the students;
4. students can see comments before the tutorial and there is no anxiety about losing paper scripts;
5. ease of looking back over written work in GradeMark when writing end of term reports – they are always there to refer to.

Useful links:

• Training videos and tutorials provided by Turnitin
• Staff support site in WebLearn
• Turnitin User Group in WebLearn – use the site mailing address to discuss any issues with other Oxford University users

More information? Contact us at IT Services: turnitin@it.ox.ac.uk

The latest Turnitin newsletter  provides details of free online webcasts during Plagiarism Education Week. The topics on each weekday are respectively: Causes of plagiarism, Types of plagiarism, Responses to plagiarism, Approaches to plagiarism, Originality and creativity.

The week includes a student poster competition with a prize of $1000, on the theme ‘Originality Matters’.

The newsletter includes information about many more resources and events. View the newsletter online by clicking the link provided above.