Turnitin Review Project

Project Summary

The purpose of this OIT project is to review how faculty are using Turnitin software in their classes, and to determine if the university, faculty, and students are receiving optimal value for the cost of providing the service. OIT Academic Technology Initiatives (ATI) is partnering with Academic Technology Applications (ATA), to investigate what features of the Turnitin service faculty rely on in their classes, working with Turnitin global usage data to review additional trends and insights, as well as distributing a Qualtrics survey of faculty users to gauge sentiments and perceived value for students.

The goals for this project are to assess the extent to which faculty rely on Turnitin software for teaching, as well as any gaps or pain points that exist with the current Turnitin configuration or feature set. The project also seeks to determine what best practices surface from the investigations, to promote to faculty for leveraging the most from the service, in addition to any opportunities for training and support to optimize student benefits for teaching and learning, with Turnitin.

Process/Approach 

OIT is reviewing ServiceNow tickets relevant to the Turnitin software service, Turnitin global usage data provided by the vendor, as well as distributing a Qualtrics survey to faculty users. Further insights will be gleaned from research into plagiarism in the classroom and concepts for teaching students about proper attribution and citation.

Project Findings

• Instructors highly value Turnitin in their classes and its role towards positive teaching and learning outcomes in their curriculum.
• A few instructors use Turnitin in unique and novel ways to teach their students about plagiarism and proper citation.
• Numerous instructors shared hopes for innovative new ways of setting up Turnitin in their classes, such as different or custom repositories.
• Instructors expressed interest in clarifying the tradeoffs and different functionality available between the GradeMark integration, and the Quick Integration, which OIT currently recommends for most courses using Turnitin in Canvas.
• A questionnaire, rubric, or survey could help instructors differentiate Turnitin features and benefits, by walking through the setup process to help determine settings and configurations to achieve specific curriculum and teaching goals.

Project Participants