Tuesday, January 5, 2016

Turnitin Feature in D2L 10.5.5

With the successful upgrade of D2L to the current 10.5.5 version on December 16,2015, a newer version of Turnitin is available for faculty use. The current tool offers a streamlined interface and makes it more intuitive to enable Turnitin when you set up your Dropbox folders. The most noticeable changes are as follows:
  • Turnitin is now a New tab in the Dropbox tool as opposed to an option on the Properties tab as it used to be. So it’s easy to find when faculty set up Dropbox folders.
  • Settings and other options are consequently available through the new Turnitin tab. More options are made available, including sources that instructors may choose to compare papers against, exclusion of checked materials and matches, originality report generation and submission, storing location of submissions, etc. Because of the single page where all options are placed, it is less easy for instructors to miss things during settings setup. 
  • Some instructors may find the GradeMark tool helpful as it allows marking up papers without having to download submissions and re-upload marked papers for student review. There is now a feature that will allow you to bring the numeric Turnitin grade into the Dropbox grade field. However, we still recommend use of comments functionality in Rubrics and Grades tools in D2L due to better integration with the LMS and the course.  
  • The new Turnitin tab can be found when instructors create a New (Dropbox) Folder or access Edit Folder page within the Dropbox tool.
  • The Dropbox is the only venue through which instructors can enable Turnitin.
To get a quick overview of the new Turnitin tool and features, please check out this video tutorial: https://youtu.be/PfF4y9J2Oew

There are a few things to note if instructors have some established dropbox folders with Turnitin already being enabled:
  • All copied, imported or exported dropbox folders don’t have the former Turnitin options applied so instructors need to re-enable Turnitin and reset the options.
  • When Turnitin is re-enabled, the new integration is automatically applied. All new dropbox folders use the new integration.
  • To ensure that group submissions can still be checked using Turnitin, instructors can configure Turnitin to check against external sources instead of against submissions from other learners.
General Turnitin Tips:
  • Check to "Allow learners to see Turnitin similarity scores in their dropbox folder”. The originality report is a terrific teaching tool, but only if students can see it!
  • Keep your Dropbox instructions under 1000 characters if you will be using Turnitin. Longer assignment instructions can go in a previous page of the learning module where the Dropbox Assignment folder is linked, or they can be attached as a document to the D2L Dropbox.

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