Turnitin assignments not resetting properly – issue now resolved!

At the start of the academic year and in preparation for the next cohort of students on a course, staff are required to ‘Reset’ their Moodle courses. This removes students work and grades but leaves course resources and activities in place.

An issue was identified at the end of July that was affecting Turnitin assignments when a Moodle course was ‘Reset’. This has now been resolved. Staff can now reset their Moodle courses. HOWEVER, the process of resetting courses has changed slightly so please read through the guidance provided via this link carefully, paying particular attention to step 4 of the process.

If you reset your course/s containing Turnitin assignments before 11th August, the Digital Education team suggest resetting them again, to ensure the issue described below does not occur.

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An issue has been identified that is affecting Turnitin assignments when a Moodle course is ‘Reset’.

At the start of the academic year and in preparation for the next cohort of students on a course, staff are required to ‘Reset’ their Moodle courses. This removes students work and grades but leaves course resources and activities in place.

Issue

The ‘Reset’ function in Moodle normally creates a new class ID for a Turnitin assignment and staff should then be able to edit the assignment settings accordingly.  The issue that has been identified is that resetting the course seems to ‘lock’ the anonymous marking setting to  ‘Yes’  making it un-editable.  However, even if the Post date is edited and no submission has been made, student’s names are visible.

We have reported the issue to Turnitin and they have acknowledged that there is problem and indicated that they hope to have a solution we can implement by the end of the week.

Action Required (temporary workaround)

We recommend, where feasible, that you wait until we have a fix in place and refrain from ‘resetting’  your course until we advise otherwise.

Staff who have reset their courses in preparation for the next cohort of students or any staff planning to reset their courses before the issue is resolved should take the following steps:

After resetting your Moodle course:

• Delete the Turnitin assignment(s) that currently exist
• Create new Turnitin assignment (s) with the required settings

  Guidance and instructions on creating Turnitin assignments are available from our Moodle Resource Centre: https://wiki.ucl.ac.uk/display/MoodleResourceCentre/M20+-+Turnitin+Assignment

We apologise for the inconvenience caused and will advise when the issue has been resolved.

If you have any questions of concerns, please contact the Digital Education team by emailing
digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk