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Overview
What is Turnitin?
Turnitin is a third party tool, hosted externally and integrated with Moodle. It has a number of possible uses in different combinations here at UCL.
- to support students in developing their academic writing, including how to use and reference sources;
- to help detect poor academic writing practice, including plagiarism, when it does occur;
- as one alternative via Moodle to manage all stages of the assessment process, including submission, marking and returning work (n.b. one of several Moodle alternatives);
- to provide closely contextualised feedback as 'bubble comments' and an optional recorded spoken-word message, which students can then refer to in future work;
- for record keeping (both for students and staff).
What are the benefits?
Turnitin is most helpful when it is used to streamline assessment procedures, give and receive feedback and support good academic writing. The full benefits of all forms of e-assessment becomes apparent when the process is entirely digitised, without requiring paper copies.
Benefits which Turnitin shares with other forms of e-assessment are:
- provision of feedback which is typed and therefore legible (this overcomes a major obstacle preventing students taking up feedback);
- provision of a record of feedback available to students online in a timely way, encouraging them to consult it for future work;
- the goodwill of students who no longer have to travel and queue to submit work;
- many support staff hours saved from receiving, sorting, allocating, and posting scripts to assessors and examiners;
- assessors no longer have to wait for the post - this either gives them a longer period in which to mark or it reduces the marking lead time;
- automation of record keeping, reducing the burden on office staff;
- ability to download and mark offline;
- easier access to scripts in the event of a query;
- a saving of space allocated to storing paper copies.
Benefits specific to Turnitin:
- anonymous submission (as of summer 2013, Moodle too will offer anonymity in its Assignment tools)
- contextualised feedback in the form of 'bubble comments', which are attached to the part of the work they pertain to;
- an integrated summary audio comment tool which is very easy to use;
- the ability for staff to see whether students have looked at their feedback;
- an Originality Report highlighting parts of a student's work which match other sources, based on a wide-ranging (though not exhaustive) search of digitised publications and work submitted by students.
- students have the opportunity to submit draft work and obtain their own confidential Originality Report which helps them to understand quoting, paraphrasing, and referencing. It can flag inaccurate quoting, over-quoting, patch writing, and other poor practice.
How do I access Turnitin?
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