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):
- 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.)
- 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.)
- 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.)
- 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.
