Moodle - Turnitin

What does the Turnitin Assignment do?

Using the Turnitin Assignment activity you can create a Turnitin dropbox, which allows students to upload an assignment(s) to Turnitin via Moodle. Once submitted, the activity allows instructors to assess and provide feedback for student's written work using the assessment tools available within Turnitin's Document Viewer.

Adding a Turnitin Assignment in Moodle

Step 1

Before you can make any changes to your Moodle site content you must first enable editing. To do this, click on the 'Edit mode' button located at the top right of the page.

Step 2

With editing enabled, you will see in each topic the following button:

Step 3

Click the Turnitin Assignment icon from the list to add. You can find more information about Turnitin assignments by clicking "Explore this tool".

Step 4 – General settings

You will now see the 'Adding a new Assignment' page, you will be required to give your assignment a name, assessment type, weighting and submission type here. You can also add a summary to give guidance to learners, but this is optional - this only display if you choose it to do so by clicking on "Display description on course page".

In the General settings you will also find the following options to select from:

• Number of parts – this allows for the creation of a multi-part assignment, where individual students can submit one piece of work to each part. A maximum of 5 parts can be chosen.

• The Maximum File Size – this determines the maximum file size for each user submission to each assignment part.

• Submission Type – here you can choose File Upload (where a student submits an existing document) or Text Submission (where students type straight into an online textbox).

• Similarity Reports – if set to Yes, students can view the originality report for their submission.

• Grade display - set to either fraction or percentage

• Auto refresh Grades - this will automatically update any changes to grades for students

Step 5– Grade and Assignment settings

The Grade area allows you to choose the maximum grade available and type of grade for an assignment as well as any grades needed to pass.

The Assignment area allows you to set...

1. Start date - the date the assignment will start.

2. End date - the date the assignment is due.

3. Post date - the date that marks and feedback from GradeMark are released to students.

Step 7 - Similarity Reports

The next collection of settings are the Turnitin Advanced Options.

Settings include:

• Allow late submissions – When set to Yes, students are allowed to submit their assignments after the due date and time, so long as they have not already submitted an assignment. Late submissions will be marked with red text in the date column of the submission in the assignment inbox.

• Report Generation Speed – 3 options:

  • Generate reports immediately (Students cannot resubmit) – students can only submit their assignment once and the report is available immediately. This counts for each part of the submission.

  • Generate reports immediately (Students can resubmit until due date) – students can submit their assignment up to 3 times until the due date. A report will be generated within 24h of submission.

  • Generate reports on due date (Students can resubmit until due date) – the originality report will not be generated until the due date and time of the part. Students can resubmit as many times as they like until the due date without receiving reports.

(Note: The University’s Turnitin policy states that students should be offered the opportunity to check their own draft text-based assignment using Turnitin.)

• Store Students Papers – Here you can specify which repository the students’ assignments will be submitted to. This means the assignments will be stored in a database and used for future originality reports (only the student and the instructor will have access to the assignment):

  • No Repository – the assignments will not be added to any repository.

  • Standard Repository (default) – the assignments will be submitted to a Turnitin repository that contains assignments previously submitted through Turnitin dropboxes.

The following settings allow you to specify which search targets you would like to search against.

• Check against stored student papers – assignments submitted to Turnitin from all universities.

• Check against Internet – a repository of archived and live publicly available internet pages containing billions of pages of existing content.

• Check against journals, periodicals and publications – third-party periodicals and journals; includes many major professional journals, periodicals and business publications.

• Exclude Bibliography – this allows the ability to control the option of whether the bibliographic material will be excluded from the originality report.

• Exclude Quoted Material – this allows the ability to control the option of whether quoted material will be excluded from the originality report.

• Exclude small matches – this allows the ability to control the option of whether small matches will be excluded from the originality report.

Step 8 - GradeMark Options

From the Grade Mark Options you can create or reuse a rubric you wish to use for grading via the Rubric Manager. Templates are available to download from the Rubric manager and can be imported from Excel files.

Note: students will be able to view attached rubrics and their content prior to submitting.

Step 9 - Common module settings and Restrict access

As with any Moodle item, you can assign a Group or grouping to the Turnitin Assignment. Likeswise, you are also able to set restrictions on the assignment.

When you are happy with the options you have selected, select Save and display at the bottom of the page to create the Turnitin Assignment.

Step 10

When you are finished, click on 'Save and display' button.

Step 11 - Overview

A summary of the Turnitin Assignment will appear, with each part you specified on its own line.

Start Date – the date/time from when students can begin uploading their work.

Due Date – the date/time the students’ work is due in.

Post Date – this is used if you are marking online with Grademark. This date will be when students will be able to view their Grademark comments and see their overall grade.

Using the pencil symbol at the end of each row, you can edit the name of the part, the start date, due date and post date.

Make sure you do this for each Part of the Assignment, then select Submit to save any changes.

Step 12 - Submissions

To view submissions, select the Submission Inbox tab. You will see a list of people attached to the Turnitin Assignment. If a student has made a submission you will see their submitted file(s) underneath their name.

Select the name of the file to load the Turnititn document viewer. You can then look at the plagiarism result and carry out online marking (guides below). Each submission will get a similarity score but this can some time to come through. If a score hasn’t come through, try pressing the Refresh Submissions tab.

Turnitin offers its own comprehensive user guides. You can find all of the guides here:

Instructor Guides

Further help on Turnitin can be obtained from your Faculty Online Course Developers