Turnitin

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Turnitin Flex Workshop Recordings & Updates

Turnitin is a cloud-based service for originality checking, online grading and peer review that saves instructors time and provides rich feedback to students. Turnitin is used to support the submission, tracking, plagiarism prevention, and evaluation of student work online. As of April 2023, Turnitin also provides an evaluation of the likelihood of student writing being generated by AI (artificial intelligence).

It’s a good practice to use Turnitin to support student learning about academic writing through a formative process, and not as a policing tool. The following Dos and Don’ts are from a Turnitin presentation about best practices.

Dos:

  • Set clear expectations regarding academic integrity
  • Help students understand the relationship and differences between similarity and plagiarism
  • Use the Similarity Score formatively
  • Ensure that students understand the Similarity Score and what it means about their writing

Don’ts:

  • Use the Similarity Score as a “gotcha” or punitive measure
  • Conflate similarity and plagiarism
  • Use the Similarity Score exclusively as a summative measure 
  • Implement the use of the Similarity Score without ensuring that students understand what it means and how they can use it to improve their writing

Turnitin is available in Canvas.  MiraCosta College has an unlimited license to Turnitin, GradeMark, and Peer Review for all courses.

Canvas integration with Turnitin

Turnitin is available within Canvas in two different ways. As of August 2019, Turnitin says that both of these integration methods will be supported indefinitely. The links below provide more details about how to use each method.

  • Turnitin LTI 2.0 for Canvas
    • Offers a tighter integration between Turnitin and Canvas within Canvas Assignments.
    • The Turnitin experience still “feels” like Canvas.
    • For faculty who like to use the Canvas grading tools along with Turnitin’s plagiarism checking capabilities.
  • Turnitin LTI 1.0  for Canvas (Classic LTI Version)
    • Uses Canvas’s “External Tool” feature to connect seamlessly from Canvas over to Turnitin.
    • Users clearly notice that they have gone from Canvas into Turnitin.
    • For faculty who like to use Turnitin’s grading and feedback tools along with its plagiarism detection.

Turnitin Status Updates & Support

Check below if you are experiencing Turnitin errors – often these are due to issues with the entire Turnitin service and are not something we control locally.

Turnitin has several support services for your questions or problems:

Plagiarism Prevention & Student Intellectual Property

MiraCosta faculty using Turnitin for plagiarism prevention should be aware of these key points from MiraCosta’s administrative procedure on intellectual property:

When an instructor makes use of software that incorporates student works into its database, as is common with plagiarism-prevention software, the use should be governed by the following guidelines:

–  Student work may not be submitted to plagiarism-prevention software or other software that incorporates a student’s work into its database without the student’s knowledge.
–  Students should be informed in the syllabus that such software is used in the course and that the software incorporates any student work submitted into its database.
–  Students should be given alternatives, such as requiring students who do not submit their work to plagiarism-prevention software, to document their references using an annotated bibliography and/or photocopies of the first page of all sources used and/or to write a brief paper describing their research methodologies.

Learn more about Turnitin

Professional development opportunities are available from Turnitin: