Recently a member of the eLearning team was lucky enough to attend the 2013 turnitin conference at the Leeds School of Music.
For those who are unfamiliar with turnitin- it is a piece of software for teaching staff that checks academic work for plagiarism, we use it here in the college to check for plagiarism and similarities between student work. turnitin currently serves over;
- 1 million active instructors
- 20 million licensed students
- 10,000 educational institutions
130 of the top 200 universities in the world use turnitin, as indicated in the Times Higher Education World Rankings (2012) with customers located in 126 countries.
Highlights from turnitin’s roadmap 2013-2014
Below are selected highlights from turnitin’s roadmap over the next 6 months
1. Upload Powerpoint to turnitin (Nov 13)
Presentations are a useful form of assessment and now they will not need to be converted into a PDF before they are uploaded.
2. Upload any filetype. (Q4 2013)
This will allow students to upload any work to turnitin. You will not necessarily be able to use the quickmark tools but it would allow a more consistent approach to electronic submission assignment submission.
3. Small re-theme.
Screen space is always precious; a slight retheme will be done to increase the marking area as default making it easier for people to be able to mark online.
Future plans for turnitin (6 Months +)
Add voice comments anywhere on the document. – In a similar way to adding text comments, you will soon be able to voice comments to anywhere in the document.
As with all roadmaps the timescales could move.
To view the slides from the whole conference please visit https://iparadigms.app.box.com/s/upmetcmec8npn0m9si9s
There is a new version of the turnitin plugin for LearnZone which we will be trailing in the coming months. If anyone is interested in testing it please get in touch in the comments below or by emailing matt.aldred@loucoll.ac.uk