ianmcnaught's posterous

Note: This post is about integrating Turnitin with Moodle 1.9, if you have made the leap to 2.0 it may not be relevant to you. If you are assessing a turnitin integration for any other VLE, it's worth reading this post to see what things to watch out for.

If you read the turnitin blurb on their direct Moodle integration, it sounds fantastic. It offers a proper "moodle like" experience (rather than turnitin in a frame), and it gives the impression that you get the full feature set of turnitin, minus peer mark. Even better, you can run both integrations side by side, so you could keep the basic integration there for Peer mark, and use the direct one for everything else. We switched to this at the beginning of last semester (February. Funny time to switch, but we had our reasons), and have since found that everything is not quite as we expected. For the benefit of anyone else considering the direct integration, this is my review of the its good and bad parts.

First of all, I will list what I have found to be the good points. I have marked them as to whether they most benefit students, academics or admin.

The good

• STUDENTS: On the whole, it is a better user experience for the student, as they never leave Moodle, all communication with turnitin is done in the background via their API.
• ADMIN: Papers are stored locally in the Moodle file system as well as with Turnitin. Considering how hard turnitin makes it to download assignments from old modules, this is a great advantage when it comes to archiving, or just retrieving old assignments.
• ADMIN: There are options added in the Course Reset page which can create duplicate turnitin assignments in preparation for your new term. This is a god send for end of term rollover where the basic integration is a nightmare (if you create a copy of the course, the course ID changes so the turnitin links break, if you just reset the course, the class lists and submissions from the previous term remain (and students remain active against your quota), if you delete the assignment you loose access to all submissions and only Turnitin support can restore it).
• ADMIN: Because the assignment creation page is hosted on your Moodle install as a PHP file, you can easily change the default assignment settings to match your institutions needs. For example, if you want to allow late submissions by default, you can change the file and make this the default option for everyone (See here for instructions). Technically, you could even hide or disable certain controls if you wanted to actively prevent certain settings from being changed.
• ACADEMICS: All the students will display in the assignment inbox without the need for Roster Sync. I have lost count of how many times in the past I’ve had staff worry about why they don’t have a full list of students in their inbox. The reality is this is never a problem, students will be added to the assignment when they submit, or to force it you can roster sync, but it does make staff uneasy, so it’s an advantage to not have to deal with this in the Direct integration.

As you can see, there are some considerable advantages to the integration, but most of them are of benefit to the Moodle administrator, not to student or academics, the more important stakeholders.

These are the issues I have found difficulties with, again categorised as a student, academic or admin issue.

The bad

• ACADEMICS & ADMIN: Can’t download assignments as a batch. Actually you can, but only through turnitin.com if you are the assignment owner. This is relatively easy to setup once you know how, but a totally obtuse process that no one is going to work out on their own.
• ACADEMICS & ADMIN: No way of downloading the grademarked paper from the assignment inbox, you can only download it from document viewer, so also again one at a time.
• ACADEMICS: Only basic settings are available for creating an assignment. Key ones that are missing are the option to exclude small or cited matches. This can be set in the document view by applying a filter, but it would have to be done individually on every single paper submitted. It can’t be set as a global setting for the assignment. You can't even make these changes in turnitin.com because assignment settings for assignments created in Moodle are locked.
• The most serious one: STUDENTS: Turnitin claiming that you can use both integrations at once, so we took their word for it and did. It turns out to not be quite so simple. Student accounts cannot be shared between the two integrations, so if they have submitted to both integrations, they will automatically have two accounts with turnitin, counting as two students on your quota of student accounts. We pay for 50 more accounts than we have students, but ran out of accounts with hundreds of students still trying to submit. This meant students couldn’t submit for quite a few days until turnitin acknowledged the problem and boosted our quota enough for us to get by. Lesson is, ignore what turnitin say and don’t use both at the same. It would be impossible to ensure that students were only submitting to one or the other.

What you no doubt notice here is that the benefits are heavily weighted towards Moodle administrators, and the disadvantages towards academics and students! Naturally if academics and students are having difficulties, it ends up on the desk of the administrator, so any benefits gained are soon wiped out!

Has anyone else used the direct integration? Would you agree with my assessment? Any issues I’ve missed out or misunderstood?