Higher Education & Turnitin

Turnitin is a useful assessment tool, particularly for Higher Education learners. The Feedback Studio allows teachers to mark with rubrics, quick marks, annotation, plagiarism reporting and more.

Many organisations use Turnitin within their existing LMS such as Canvas, Moodle or Blackboard. This allows users to assign work to existing courses and for multiple markers to have equal access, however it is important to note that all assignments are stored in Turnitin as the main platform. Therefore any courses in your LMS are mapped into the Turnitin Feedback Studio.

When I launched Teams as a VLE for our organisation in June 2020 I had to think about Turnitin alternatives to use moving forwards. After researching the usage in my organisation I could see that it was predominantly used by Higher Education teachers and they wanted to reuse their existing rubrics and marking schemes for the next academic year. Therefore I looked into the Microsoft Teams integration and the Feedback Studio alone.

The Teams integration only allows users to review similarity reports so this proved to be useful for our Further Education teachers. The Feedback studio can be added as a website within a Team page and single sign on can be setup through a standard API key. Unfortunately you cannot assign multiple markers within the Feedback Studio alone so I have used Moodle to trigger this. All of the existing features that you have in the LMS integration can be found in the Feedback Studio as it runs through your internet browser but the user interface is rather limited. Hopefully in time Turnitin will update the appearance and layout of Turnitin classes for users to make it more accessible. It is also important to note that if a tutor accidentally deletes a class or assignments the Turnitin team are incredibly helpful and can restore any submitted assignments.

However, as always it is really important for organisations to have a clear quality assurance policy for staff and students to ensure awarding body requirements are met. In addition, tutors need to share their assessment schedules and educate learners about plagiarism reports throughout the academic year. Finally, tutors need to export marked submissions regularly to save evidence for external invigilators and auditors.