Good news for Turnitin and GradeMark users

Earlier this week I was at the 6th International Integrity and Plagiarism Conference (#6iipc) at the Sage in Newcastle/Gateshead. As a pre-conference activity, the Turnitin International User Group took place, where we got an opportunity to hear about the product roadmap and plans for the future. In the light of the recent acquisition of iParadigms by Insight Venture Partners, I was certainly interested in how this will affect us users of the Turnitin suite of products.

It seems the effect is that there will be increased investment in the product. This is a good thing, since apart from the iPad app (which I love) the products have not really been updated much in the last couple of years. Sure, students can now submit more file types, and rubrics can be imported from Excel, but the basic interface hasn't changed in a while.

Enter the new, Next Generation Document Viewer (DV for short). From what we saw, this looks like it will be a very nice improvment on the current one. For a start, the student paper will take up most of the screen space, allowing improved readability and better use of space. Other features of the new DV are:

• All the tools will appear in a menu on the right, which can collapse when you are not using it.
• Turnitin and GradeMark can be displayed within the single view in the DV, so you can grade while still having full colour similarities displayed.
• Thumbnails on the left will allow you to navigate more easily, while providing some context about where exactly you are in the document.
• There will be improvements to using rubrics, selecting rubrics and grading using rubrics.
• It will be possible to add inline voice comments (not just a single overall voice comment) which can be played back by the student in context.
• Some limited formatting of text comments will be available, including bolding, underlining and hyperlinks.

Apart from the Next Generation Document Viewer, other things we can look forward to are:

• Multiple marking - allowing two or more markers to grade and give feedback on a piece of work. This gives an opportunity for a moderator (for example) to determine which feedback is seen by the student and which overall grade is returned.
• It will be possible to create groups, supporting delegated marking (one marker allocated to a particular group of students), which will be very useful for large classes.
• A student will be able to submit multiple drafts for an assignment, which won't overwrite previous versions, each of which can be marked. This will provide students and instructors with a history of feedback on each draft.
• It will be possible to submit multiple documents for a single assignment.
• It will be possible to give letter grades, and decimal grades.

When can we expect all this at NUI Galway? Probably not until Summer 2015. Although some users will be able to see changes from later this year, because we access Turnitin through a Blackboard Integration, it won't be available to us until early in 2015. Not wanting to make any major changes to the teaching environment during the teaching semester, this means we can't plan on upgrading the Integration until the send of semester 2.

But at least we know there's something to look forward to!


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International Turnitin User Group Meeting

The International Turnitin User Group meeting took place on Monday 16th July at the Sage in Gateshead, just before the start of the 5th International Plagiarism Conference. This was a great opportunity to meet with Turnitin representatives as well as other Turnitin users, to compare experiences and find out about the product roadmap.

After a welcome from Will Murray (VP International), Christian Storm (CTO) gave an update on recent developments and current research in the Turnitin suite.

It's clear that there has been a shift in focus from plagiarism detection towards supporting assessment and feedback, with a view to improving student outcomes. Turnitin aims to be the complete solution for improving student writing and the best-in-class solution for grading. It seems that the company has really been listening to its customers, and my impression is that future directions are very positive and exciting.

Recent developments include voice based grading (which I haven't played with yet), fewer noisy matches and false positives, translated plagiarism (e.g. via google translate) and support for left to right languages (e.g. Arabic). Current research is looking at more advanced phrase exlusion, so that particular phrases (perhaps specific to the discipline, or "boilerplate" text) can be excluded from reports by assignment, or forever. Turnitin is also working on stylometrics, which can identify changes in writing style, to help address the problem of ghost writing.

On the integration side, Turnitin has been working on new APIs, meaning new integrations for Moodle and Blackboard. Different roles and views are also being considered, to facilitate double marking or read-only access. It was stressed that each institution has different workflows, which are a challenge to defining roles.

During the Q&A session there was lively discussion involving plans for globalisation of the product and adding more languages (must get Irish on the list); legal defensibility of decisions arising from originality reports; support for more varied filetypes and assessment types; PeerMark lite, allowing peer review earlier in the workflow; communication with customers about new product features (still not ideal); customer involvement in beta testing; improved workflow for anonymous marking; and bulk download of originality reports for archival purposes. And all this before coffee!

Somebody raised a question about a dashboard for policy makers - which might allow access to orginiality reports to support benchmarking for individual teachers, departments or even institutions. There was a collective intake of breath at this point. Turnitin executives hastened to reassure that this was not a likely development, and that it would require a huge a amount of data. However, there has been a focus on improved analytics, for students, staff and administrators.

The Product Roadmap
After the coffee break, Steve Golik (VP Product Management) gave us some updates on the product roadmap, repeating the vision of the company To be the world's more innovative and effective technology for improving students' written work.

One welcome development is the GradeMark interactive tutorial, which allows instructors to practice and get used to the functionality of GradeMark without worrying about live student work.

The new Instructor Dashboard is currently being rolled out, providing a more modern entry point and easier navigation. Unfortunately this is not yet available via integrations, but the interface looks clean and user-friendly.

On the horizon are common core rubrics, which will make the sharing of rubrics easier. Also, digital receipts will be accessible within the system, by both instructors and students, improving traceability. There will be more flexible grading and marking, including support for letter grades and decimal points.

Grading on an iPad
In the last 6 months I've been working with a number of academic staff to use of GradeMark to support electronic assessment and feedback for students. One barrier to this has been that the full functionality of GradeMark doesn't work on an iPad.

Perhaps the most exciting development is the new GradeMark iPad app, due for release in January 2013. Steve gave a demo of the current version, which looks very promising. This will be an instructor focussed, grading application, giving full support for grading, voice comments, text comments, access to rubrics, on-paper marking and with originality as a layer. An instructor can grade offline; the app will synch back to the web when the iPad has a suitable connection.

I tried to get a photo of the demo as it was happening, but the screen was just too bright for my camera to focus.

More on What's New with Turnitin is available online and by following @TurnitinProduct on twitter.

That, more or less, brought the User Group meeting to a close, in time for the start of the International Plagiarism Conference, but it was not the end of discussions about Turnitin. I'll blog about the conference in the next couple of days.

Cath Ellis has already written a number of blog posts on the event:

• iParadigms Focus Group
• 5th International Plagiarism Conference: Day 1 Keynotes
• 5th International Plagiarism Conference: Day 1 Sessions and Workshops
• 5th International Plagiarism Conference: Day 2 Keynotes

(I'm beginning to suspect she is WonderWoman)


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International Plagiarism Conference

This afternoon I am UK-bound again, this time to Newcastle, for the 5th International Plagiarism Conference. Having been to two previous events, I'm looking forward to catching up with some old friends and meeting some new ones. I will miss Jo Badge @jobadge, who has moved on to new challenges.

Although not strictly learning technologies, I will post my thoughts on the conference, and will certainly be tweeting from the event - the hashtag is #5ipc. Day 1, Monday, incorporates the Turnitin User Group meeting, and I'm looking forward to hearing about the roadmap for this product.

So, do follow me on twitter for updates. And if you are going to be at the conference, let me know so that we can meet up.

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Getting started with Turnitin

Last Friday I gave a workshop on Using Turnitin to Deter Plagiarism for academic staff at St Angela's College, Sligo. St Angela's is a college of NUI Galway and occupies a beautiful site on the shore of Lake Gill, just outside Sligo, and it is always a pleasure to visit there.

The workshop was aimed at teaching staff getting started with using Turnitin. As we went through the practicalities of setting up a Turnitin assignment in their VLE (moodle) and discussed strategies and options, I stressed a few points. These are the take-home messages that I think are key when starting to use Turnitin.

1. Focus on the teaching: the 12 people in the group were concerned teachers. The last thing they want or need to become is "plagiarism police", with a focus on plagiarism detection. Turnitin is best used as a teaching tool, so make sure that the strategy you use, and every option you choose, is based on improving the learning for your students. 

2. Turnitin does not detect plagiarism, it highlights matching text. It is very good at what it does, but it cannot tell you that a student has plagiarised. You, as the teacher, are the one who decides if the matching text indicates a problem, or otherwise.

3. Turnitin can only be used to help detect plagiarism of text, or cut-and-paste copying. It doesn't identify plagiarism of ideas, and won't be of any use with ghost-written materials.

4. Originality reports have to be interpreted. You have to examine a report to understand what the coloured highlighting is telling you. There are many reasons why text might be highlighted: direct quotes, bibliographic references or just writing on a particular topic using the correct language for the discipline. Highlighted text could be an indication that the student has actually performed a good literature survey!

5. The similarity index should never be used as a measure of plagiarism. Do I really need to explain this?

6. You have to follow up, when you find a problem. This could be in the form of general feedback to a class group, where there are common issues across the class; or individual feedback to address a particular piece of writing. Where a serious problem exists, it will be necessary to use formal procedures. Feedback should come first though, see point (1).

7. Giving students access to originality reports can be a great learning tool, when they are learning academic writing. But it has to be in a supported environment, where they can understand how to interpret what they are seeing. See point (4).

For more on strategies for using Turnitin, see my presentation from the E-Assessment Scotland conference in Dundee last August.

Do you have any take-home messages for teachers starting off with Turnitin in the classroom? Please add to the list by writing a comment. Feedback on my list is also welcome.

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Using Turnitin with large classes to support student writing

Back in June I gave a presentation at the 4th International Plagiarism Conference on using Turnitin with large classes to support student writing. The full paper and the powerpoint presentation are now available on the conference website.

The paper describes a pilot study in 2008-2009 involving 3 case studies with large undergraduate student groups, from 120 to 600 students, and addresses the use of Turnitin to support student writing and offer formative feedback, rather than focus purely on plagiarism detection.

Using Turnitin with such large student groups (in 2009-2010 we successfully used it with a class of 950 students) really requires that Turnitin be integrated into the VLE, allowing the students self-submit their work. At NUI Galway, we are using Blackboard, which in turn is integrated with our student records system, thus reducing the administrative overload for staff.

We found that Turnitin can be used to support academic staff in their teaching and assessment. Some of the initial motivation for using Turnitin was that staff were concerned about perceived levels of cut-and-paste plagiarism and collusion within the student groups. With multiple tutorial groups and large numbers of postgraduate tutors, this can be difficult to manage across large cohorts of students. The case studies found that, using Turnitin, tutors were able to identify problems with referencing, to support plagiarism detection, to identify excellent work, and to raise issues generally around student writing. For course co-ordinators there was better visibility into the student group as a whole.

In one (first year) student group, where students were given access to their originality reports for draft submissions and could use them to improve the final versions of submitted work, Turnitin was found to be particularly useful to highlight the importance of originality, and as a way of helping students understand what is expected of them at University level.

The role of the teaching team in each of the case studies was vital to the success of the intervention. Each case-study was academic-driven, brought into the classroom as part of the assessment practice, and not treated as an add-on to teach literacy skills. In each case, teaching teams were brought together to agree a consistent approach to dealing with academic integrity within the discipline. In this way academic honesty became a shared value across the teaching team, giving a consistent message to students.

We found that the best results followed where Turnitin was not being used purely for plagiarism detection. In fact, contrary to our initial expectations, there was little evidence to suggest that its use was a successful deterrent. Rather, it supported the discourse around good writing skills and gave an opportunity to raise awareness of academic writing within the classroom.

I am now interviewing academic staff who used Turnitin in 2009-2010, in the second year of the study. Some of these were involved in the original case studies, and it is interesting to get their perspectives after a second year.

I'm hoping to update the case studies and also describe how Grademark has been used within the discipline of English to facilitate online grading of student work. Cath Ellis has written a very good post of her experiences with Grademark. Her observations certainly match with our experiences here.

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