Adding a Turnitin Assignment in Moodle

Adding a Turnitin Assignment in Moodle

Enable editing

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

Step 1

With editing enabled, you will see in each topic the Add an activity or resource link. Click this link to view the Add an activity or resource window.

Select Turnitin Assignment from the window.

Step 2

Add your Turnitin Assignment Name and Summary; your summary could include, for example, any instructions or guidance that you want to give participants. (Note: it may be useful to include ‘Turnitin’ somewhere in the title in order to help students locate the assignment more easily.)

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

• 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).
  Default – Any Submission Type. In most cases you will choose File Upload here.

• 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.
  Default – 1.

• The Maximum File Size – this determines the maximum file size for each user submission to each assignment part. Allowed values range from 10KB to 20MB.
  Default – 20MB.

• Anonymous Marking – enables anonymous marking. Note that once anonymous marking has been enabled on an assignment it cannot be disabled.
  Default – Yes. (The default setting is determined by University regulations regarding marking.)

• Student Originality Reports – if set to Yes, students can view the originality report for their submission.
  Default – Yes. (Recommended so that Turnitin can help students develop their writing skills.)

Step 3

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.
  Default – Yes. (Late assignments are allowed, but attract a penalty.)

• Report Generation Speed – 3 options:

  • Generate reports immediately, first report is final – students can only submit their assignment once and the report is available immediately. This counts for each part of the submission.

  • Generate reports immediately, reports can be overwritten until due date – students can submit their assignment as many times as they like until the due date (for each part of the assignment) and the report is available immediately. Each time they submit, the previous submission within each part will be overwritten. Please note: if a student resubmits their work there is a longer delay (24 hours) between submitting and receiving the report.

  • Generate reports on 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.
    Default – Generate reports immediately, reports can be overwritten until due date. (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.

  • Institutional Repository – the assignments will be added to a repository that contains assignments previously submitted to Turnitin from the University of Portsmouth.

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.
  Default – Yes.

• Check against Internet – a repository of archived and live publicly available internet pages containing billions of pages of existing content. Tens of thousands of new pages added daily.
  Default – Yes.

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

• Exclude Bibliography – this allows the ability to control the option of whether the bibliographic material will be excluded from the originality report. Note that you can include/exclude the bibliography when viewing or analysing the originality report.
  Default – Yes.

• Exclude Quoted Material – this allows the ability to control the option of whether quoted material will be excluded from the originality report. Note that you can include/exclude the bibliography when viewing or analysing the originality report.
  Default – Yes.

• Exclude small matches – this allows the ability to control the option of whether small matches will be excluded from the originality report. You can choose to exclude matches that are either below a certain number of words or below a certain percentage.

Step 4

From the Grade settings you can select the type of grading you wish to use for the Turnitin Assignment. If "scale" is chosen, you can then choose the scale from the "scale" dropdown. If using "point" grading, you can then enter the maximum grade available for this activity.

Step 5

The next two boxes in the setup process are Common module settings and Restrict access.

As with any Moodle item, you can assign a Group or grouping to the Turnitin Assignment (groups might have their own version of the Assignment, or a selective release might be applied to a particular group/s). If you have Moodle groups set up you can display the submissions for each group, which is useful if there is more than one marker.

Enable a Restrict access date to hide the Turnitin Assignment on the home page until you want it to be visible. Note that this date is NOT the Turnitin start date, due date or post date! The Assignment can be shown greyed out until the access date, or else hidden entirely.

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 6

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 7

Student Submission – If you go into the Submit Paper tab you will see the way students submit their work. (You are able to submit it on their behalf, or as a dummy student if you need to.)

You will need to specify which student it is from a drop-down list, and give the submission a title.

If your 'parts' overlap, both you and your students can select the part to which they want to submit. (We suggest that the start and due dates of each part should not overlap, in order to help prevent submissions going to the wrong place.)

You then search for a file, using the Browse button, and click Add Submission.

Step 8

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. To learn how to use these two tools, please see the separate help guides.

Each submission will get a similarity score. The score may take some time to come through. If a score hasn’t come through, try pressing the Refresh Submissions tab.