TurnItIn UK User group meeting
49 delegates attended, with more representation from the FE sector than before. HE were represented by Edinburgh, Reading, York, Cardiff, Cranfield, Keele and Oxford Brookes as well as Lboro.
Cranfield have issues with the removal of student submissions, some of which are sensitive material. If you want a submission deleted, the request has to be passed back to the iParadigms folk in Sacramento.
York use an Epigeum module on plagiarism, and students have to attain a pass mark in this course in order to pass their first year.
Cardiff flagged up that international trade in essays over the internet was a potential problem. Foreign users can’t see our essays and we can’t see theirs. So if a Hong Kong-based student passes their cousin (@ Lboro) an essay, the UK-based detection system won’t find the HK essay.
The Moodle Deep Integration plug-in is now ready.
Keele use TII extensively, but have not had much take-up of the GradeMark online marking tool (which we will introduce with the Moodle plug-in, probably at Easter).
Barriers to adoption included:
- Tutors like to mark in short bursts, wherever they can. GradeMark requires that you be online throughout the process.
- The general comments box has a limit of 9000 characters. Some academics want to write more than this on a student’s essay (!)
- Small screen size on older PCs makes use awkward. The new interface, due to be introduced in January 2011, works best with a widescreen monitor.
- Editing the text doesn’t work exactly like Track Changes in Word
- You must use numeric grading – no letter grades
- There is no audio commentary tool, though one is planned.
- There is no provision for a second marker.
- If you want to print out the marked-up essay with the tutor’s comments, you need to save it to PDF and print that out, otherwise only the student’s original text is printed.