On Thursday, 16th September 2021, our Moodle site will be upgraded to version 3.9.10 and the latest version of the Turnitin plugin will be released. Moodle will be in maintenance mode from 1:00am to 2:00am and you won’t be able to access Moodle or Turnitin during this time.

Here is a short summary of the changes and bug fixes you might notice when using the new Turnitin plugin:

Turnitin classes now expiring along with a Moodle course

Turnitin now synchronises dates in Moodle with the Turnitin database. When your Moodle course end date is over a year old, those classes also expire in Turnitin. This will free up the active student count for those classes.
Important: Turnitin classes older than one year expire and cannot be edited unless they are re-activated. 

Draft submissions will not stick in pending status 

A bug had caused some draft submissions to stick in ‘pending’ status and not generate a Similarity Report. This bug has now been fixed and draft submissions will generate Similarity Reports if enabled. 

Change in default activity tracking Moodle setting 

A bug had prevented users from being able to alter the default activity tracking setting within Moodle when Turnitin was also enabled. This bug has now been fixed, and you can use this feature alongside Turnitin without error. 

Submit button no longer visible after the due date 

The submit button will no longer be shown to students who have already submitted to the assignment when the due date has passed. The current functionality will remain for users who have not already submitted. 

Deleting parts without errors  

The option to delete a part will now only show after there is more than one part used. When there is only one part, we’ll no longer show the deletion option to prevent the assignment from potentially breaking. 

Creating or accessing Moodle assignments when Turnitin is disabled 

If Turnitin is disabled for an assignment and Turnitin is unavailable by having the wrong configuration options or being under maintenance, then an error message would be shown. This bug has been fixed, and Turnitin being unreachable will no longer impact your ability to create or access your content. 

Moodle Course name sync 

Changes to the Moodle course name will be reflected everywhere in Turnitin. When a Moodle course title is changed, this will now be updated in Turnitin too. This will include the digital receipts students receive when they submit their paper. 

Grades removal 

When a grade is removed from Turnitin, this removal will also be reflected within Moodle as the submission being ungraded. 

Turnitin icon display in Moodle assignment

In Moodle assignment, the Turnitin similarity report now has an updated Turnitin icon.

Digital Education are pleased to announce that the Turnitin Plagiarism plugin tool for Moodle assignments will be available on New Moodle from 2^nd April 2019.

This means that assignments submitted via the Moodle assignment tool can now be checked for similarities in text and a Similarity report generated.

Enabling this will ensure parity across assignment types in Moodle (with regards to similarity checking) and will allow staff and students to have the ability to check all pieces of work for similarities in text and not just those submitted via a standard Turnitin assignment.

All staff will be able to enable the setting on Moodle assignments. However, this will be run as a pilot as some but not all institutions that have the plugin enabled have reported a few issues with the plugin that can be resolved, but require workarounds. Digital Education need to ensure that these issues can be resolved and managed.  The pilot will run till the Moodle Snapshot is taken on 26th July 2019.

There are a few key things to note:

Does the tool work with group submissions?

Yes, however note that:

• Only the student who made the submission will be able to view the similarity report and will need to share it with other students in the group.
• All marking should be done using the Moodle Grading tools to ensure all students in the group have a grade recorded and can see any feedback given.

What impact will the plugin have on existing Moodle Assignments?

None at all. Existing assignments will remain as they are. If the plugin is enabled for assignments that have already been set and submissions made, then no similarity report will be generated. Students would have to resubmit to get a similarity report.

Can I set up a Moodle assignment with Turnitin enabled and grade the work in Turnitin feedback studio?

No, we do not recommend this. Turnitin should only be used for similarity checking and NOT for grading when it is enabled in a Moodle assignment.   We have detailed reasons for this in on the wiki guide.

For additional guidance on how to use this tool as a staff member, please refer to the guide – Moodle Assignment with Turnitin integration. Alternatively, if you are a student please see – the student guide .

For specific queries or support, email: digi-ed@ucl.ac.uk

Digital Education Services

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

A few months ago we alerted you to the fact that Turnitin will be moving all users to its new grading interface known as Feedback Studio.

At present, users can toggle between using Turnitin’s old interface – Turnitin Classic and its latest version Feedback Studio. From 1^st August 2017, all users will have to use Feedback Studio to view originality reports, grade work and provide feedback.

Though a number of you have already moved to using Feedback Studio as it is the default version available on UCL Moodle, some staff have chosen to revert back to the Classic version. In preparation for the switch off of the ‘Classic’ version, we recommend that all Moodle users have a go at using Feedback Studio.

The 2-minute video below is a brief walkthrough of Turnitin Feedback Studio.

Learn more about Feedback Studio

• Quick Tips for mastering Feedback Studio
• Trial Feedback Studio: Please note that not all functionality is enabled on this demo version. You can however enable feedback studio on assignments that you may currently be in the process of marking by clicking on the ‘Try Turnitin feedback Studio’ link located at the top of an open assignment.
• For additional guidance on using Feedback studio see our user guides
• Watch this video comparison between Feedback Studio and Turnitin Classic
• View our past communication regarding the move to Feedback Studio

This morning UCL’s Joint Faculty E-Learning Forum – that’s Arts & Humanities and Social & Historical Sciences – met for the second time. The first meeting had focused on assessment and feedback, so ELE gave a brief presentation on our actions since then and recommended avenues colleagues in departments could pursue.

This post provides some resources to support those, which you can also find in the presentation from the meeting below.

Student engagement with assessment feedback

Our discussions with students suggested low awareness of feedback release dates and our investigations revealed patchy engagement with feedback.

• What can we find out about student engagement with feedback? Turnitin provides some basic information to staff about student engagement with feedback. Each assignment inbox has a student response column containing either a dot (no engagement) or in the case of students who reviewed their graded paper in GradeMark for longer than 30 seconds, an icon of a person with a check mark. For a fuller picture of how long it takes students to visit their feedback, check more than once – for example, one day, one week and one month after feedback is released. Moodle Assignment has a different process: in each assignment’s Settings block, click Logs and filter actions by View.
• Since Moodle and Turnitin don’t alert the students automatically, it’s important to use the News Forum or other communication channel to draw students’ attention to feedback when it becomes available.
• ELE have guidance for Moodle Assignment on how to delay providing a numeric mark, to encourage students to engage with feedback. With Turnitin this cannot be done as a bulk process, though there are workarounds.
• Turnitin UserVoice and Moodle Tracker are available for users to contribute and vote for ideas (to create an account on Turnitin UserVoice, enter your UCL email and you should get an option to create account). For example, on Turnitin UserVoice see ‘Feedback released prior to grades’, with a corresponding item on the Moodle Tracker. Do contribute your ideas and votes.
• The solution to low engagement may lie in rethinking assessment design so as to incorporate dialogue about earlier feedback. Jisc has gathered assessment and feedback principles and provides support for the design of assessment such as the University Of Ulster’s Viewpoints. Where there is anonymous submission, ELE has guidance on Turnitin aligned with the marking policy which enables you to lift anonymity between marking and external examining, so as to enable dialogue with students. We are in the process of preparing corresponding guidance for Moodle Assignment.

External examining

• See M09 – Collecting & Marking assignments in Moodle (UCL Moodle Resource Centre) for how to give external examiners access, including access to still-anonymous marked student submissions.

Efficiency gains? Efficiency losses?

• See Supporting assessment and feedback practice with technology: from tinkering to transformation – Jisc’s Assessment & Feedback Programme synthesis report from 2013.

Advocacy with third party software providers

• Towards a consensus on priorities and actions, get involved with Jisc’s Electronic Management of Assessment project between now and August 2015. They need help from different groups of users to develop ‘user personas‘.
• To view the top 10 and top 20 priorities generated by the consultation so far, see this October 2014 blogpost from the project.

Have you ever wondered how Santa manages to grade the naughty and nice list so fast? Well the answer is technology! Just like many academic staff he uses Grademark, and very efficiently at that.

The text accompanying the video, posted by Turnitin on the video sharing site Vimeo, reads:

‘Every December, millions of children around the world write letters to Santa, explaining how they’ve been good boys and girls and letting him know what they want to see under their trees come December 25th.

Over the years, the number of kids sending him letters skyrocket. His mailbox was flooded and he found himself buried in letters, unable to respond to all of them.

One day, a little elf told Santa about Turnitin—how he could use it to accept submissions from the children, check the letters for originality, give immediate feedback, and even use rubrics to help determine if they’ve been naughty or nice. So he gave it a shot.

Share this video with your colleagues, especially the ones that look like they’ve been in an avalanche of essays.’

Watch the video and see how Santa does it.

How Santa grades millions of Christmas letters