Turnitin in Moodle Guide for AUB faculty Table of Contents Introduction... 2 Creating a Turnitin Assignment in Moodle... 2 Viewing Student Submissions and Originality reports... 4 Originality report Modes... 5 Direct Source Comparison... 5 Database Sources... 5 Internet Archive Sources... 6 Refreshing Reports... 6 Excluding Quoted and Bibliographic Material... 6 Excluding a Source from the Originality report... 6 Printing and Saving Reports... 7 Submitting Your Own Documents... 7 Allowed File Types and Sizes... 8 Important Notes... 8
Introduction Welcome to Turnitin in Moodle! This user guide provides thorough explanation of the features provided by Turnitin. Turnitin at AUB provides: Plagiarism Prevention where submitted papers are compared for matching or similar text to information, in available databases used by Turnitin. The result of this comparison is made available in an easy to read format of the Originality report. Note for previous Turnitin users: Turnitin at AUB is integrated with Moodle; you don t have to ask your students to submit their assignments to both Moodle and Turnitin. Once your students submit an assignment in Moodle, the submissions will be checked for plagiarism and an Originality report will be generated identifying non original text in the submission. You can also submit documents yourself and get an Originality report. Creating a Turnitin Assignment in Moodle To add a Turnitin assignment follow these steps: 1. First you need to log in to Moodle. http://moodle.aub.edu.lb/ 2. Go to your course and click on Turn Editing on. 3. From the Add an activity... drop down list choose an assignment type. You can either choose: a. Upload a single file b. Advanced uploading of files Currently Turnitin allows those two types only. 4. In the assignment editing page, enter the following: Assignment name Description for the assignment 5. Select assignment Grade, start and due dates for the assignment. Students are only able to submit their assignments within those dates. 6. Depending on the assignment type that you chose you will have different settings. Select your preferred settings. Then select Maximum size to be 10 MB. This is the maximum files size that Turnitin accepts. Any student submission larger than 10 MB will be rejected.
7. Select Yes to Use Turnitin Submission. 8. Show Turnitin score to student. You have three options: a. Never: percentage of originality will not appear to students. b. Always: percentage of originality will appear to students. c. When activity closed: percentage of originality will appear to students after the due date. 9. Show Turnitin report to student. You have three options: a. Never: the Originality report will not appear to the students. b. Always: the Originality report will appear to the students. c. When activity closed: the Originality report will appear to students after the due date. 10. In case you are creating the Advanced uploading of files assignment you will have an extra option to choose when the assignment should be submitted to Turnitin: a. Submit file to TII when first uploaded: will send the submission to Turnitin once the file is uploaded. b. Submit file to TII when student sends for marking: will send the file to Turnitin only when the student sends for marking. If the student never clicks on Send for marking, the file will be sent to Turnitin on the due date. YOU WILL ONLY GET THIS OPTION WHEN YOU ARE CREATING AN ADVANCED UPLOADING OF FILES ASSIGNMENT 11. Click the Save and display button. The assignment is now created! The assignment is now ready and students can start submitting their papers. Notice the note you have in the middle of the screen. All files uploaded will be submitted to the plagiarism detection service www.turnitin.com.
Viewing Student Submissions and Originality reports Once your students start submitting their assignments, you can see their submission and the Originality report generated by Turnitin. The Originality report takes an average of 10 minutes to be generated depending on the size of the submission. To view the submission and the Originality reports, make sure you are in your course on Moodle, and then click on the assignment name. On the top right of the screen you will see a link that says View X submitted assignments, where X is the number of submission. In the image to right, there is 1 student submission. Click on that link to open the student submission page. A new page will open containing the list of your students. Under Last Modified (Student) you can find the student submission and the similarity percentage (see image below). Click on the Similarity link to open the Originality report for this submission. Originality reports provide a summary of the matching text found in a submitted paper. Note: The percentage reflects the amount of non original text in the submission. But this does not reflect Turnitin s assessment of whether a paper has or has not been plagiarized. Originality reports are simply tools to help you find sources that contain text similar to submitted papers. The decision to deem any work plagiarized must be made carefully, and only after careful examination of both the submitted paper and the suspect sources. When you open the Originality report, you will see that it has three main sections:
Paper information: the top of the report page shows information about the submitted paper. This includes the paper title, the submitting user profile name information, the word count, date of the Originality report creation, and how many submissions have been made to the assignment Paper text: the extracted text only version of the submitted paper. Matching text is highlighted in a color that corresponds to the matching source listed on the right side of the Originality report. Matching source: the list of matching sources for the highlighted areas of the paper text to the left Originality report Modes By default, the Originality report shows the highest percentage matches only. In some cases, it is possible that smaller matches are obscured by larger matches and are not shown. If you would like to see an exhaustive list of sources, you can switch to the show matches one at a time mode. In this mode, all sources for a given paper are listed, even those that are obscured by larger percentage matches. To view the matching text for a given source in this mode, click the radio button next to a source. If you would like to view an Originality report showing only matching text and source links without the source view, select quickview (classic) report using the drown down list. Direct Source Comparison Direct Source Comparison allows you to quickly compare matching text to its source. To activate Direct Source Comparison, click a block of matching text. The source of matching text will open to the right. If the source you are viewing contains multiple sources of matching text, you can quickly navigate between sources using the up/down arrows. The text in the paper will automatically line up with the source for easy comparison. If you want to view matching text from an internet source in its original web context, you can do so by clicking the show in web page link. When you are done viewing a source, you can return to the list of matching sources by clicking the close link. Or you can immediately jump to another source by clicking on a new block of matching text. Database Sources Because of their strict privacy policy, sources in the Turnitin database are handled differently from internet sources. If a source is from the Turnitin database, student papers will show up next to the source.
If the source of matching text is a student paper that belongs to one of your classes, the paper will be displayed with the matching text highlighted. If the paper is from another instructor s class, we cannot provide direct access to the paper. To view the paper, you must first request permission from the instructor in possession of the paper by clicking the permission request button. We will then auto generate an e mail detailing your request. If permission to view the paper is granted, a copy of the paper will be sent back to you via e mail. Internet Archive Sources In addition to searching a copy of the active internet, Turnitin also searches a copy of the archived internet, which includes an extensive number of web pages no longer available on the internet. If a match is found in the Turnitin internet archive, internet (archive) will appear next to the source. Refreshing Reports Since new material is constantly entering Turnitin s databases from ongoing internet crawls, new publication content, and submissions made to Turnitin, it is sometimes beneficial to generate a new Originality report for a student submission at a later date to see if there are any new matching sources, or to ensure that it checks against later submissions made by other students or other classes. The option to refresh a report is available on the Originality report once it has been opened. The current report is deleted and a new report is generated. Please note that no report will be available until the new report has finished. If the user wishes, they can save or print a copy of the existing report before clicking on the green refresh icon at the top of the Originality report to have a new Originality report generated. Excluding Quoted and Bibliographic Material Originality reports document all instances of matching text including quoted and bibliographic material. If quoted or bibliographic material is flagged, you can exclude it from the report. To exclude quoted material, click the exclude quoted link. To exclude bibliographic material, click the exclude bibliography link. When you exclude material, the Originality Score on the report and in your inbox is updated to reflect the exclusion of matching text. Please note that the functions for excluding material are approximate. If more material is excluded than you would like, you can re include excluded material by clicking include quoted or included bibliography links. Excluding a Source from the Originality report Any source or match source can be removed from the Originality report modes (show highest matches together or quickview). This allows the instructor to find any underlying sources or, if the instructor determines a match is not needed, to remove it from consideration. The overall similarity index will be recalculated and change the current percentage of the Originality report if matches are excluded. To exclude a match, open an Originality report and view it either in show highest matches together or quickview (classic) mode. To the right of each source listed for a match, will be a gray X icon. Click on
this icon to exclude the source. A prompt window will open, click OK to continue. The source will be removed from the Originality report. An underlying source, if any are present, will replace it. Printing and Saving Reports To print a report in a printer friendly format, click print at the top of the Originality report. The report that is printed will be based on the mode you are currently viewing. For example, if you are viewing the report using the default highest matches mode, the report that will be printed will only show the highest matches. If you would like to save and download a copy of a report in HTML format, click on the button save. Submitting Your Own Documents You can submit documents to Turnitin yourself! To do that you first need to create an assignment as mentioned previously in this user guide. To submit your own documents: 1. After creating the assignment, you will need to switch your role to student. To do that, choose Student from the Switch role to drop down list on the top right of your course s homepage. Now you have the role of a student in your course. 2. Click on the assignment that you created. 3. Click on Browse to locate the document on your computer. Then click on the Upload this file button. 4. Your assignment is now submitted to Moodle and Turnitin. The Originality report takes an average of 10 minutes to be generated depending on the size of the submission. 5. To view the Originality report click on the Similarity link next to your submission. Notice the percentage which indicates the percentage of non original text in the submission.
Allowed File Types and Sizes Turnitin currently accepts the following file types for upload into an assignment: Microsoft Word (including Word 2007) Corel WordPerfect HTML Adobe PostScript Plain text (TXT) Rich Text Format (RTF) Portable Document Format (PDF) File size may not exceed 10.48576 MB. Files of larger size may be reduced in size by removal of nontext content. Files that are password protected, encrypted, hidden, system files, or read only files cannot be uploaded or submitted to Turnitin. Important Notes 1. Allowing students to resubmit their assignment and at the same time allowing them to see the score or report will give them a chance to update their submission based on the report, and resubmitting it before the due date of the assignment. 2. Allowing students to delete assignments submissions in the advanced uploading of files and at the same time allowing them to see the score or report will give them a chance to update their submission based on the report, and resubmitting it before the due date of the assignment. 3. In case you are submitting your own documents, it would be important to hide the assignment from your students so that they don t assume that this is an assignment they have to solve. To hide the assignment, choose Hide from the Visible drop down list in the assignment settings. 4. PDF documents must contain text to be submitted. PDF files containing only images of text will be rejected during the upload attempt. To determine if a document contains actual text, copy and paste a section or all of the text into a plain text editor such as Microsoft Notepad or Apple TextEdit. If no text is copied over, the selection is not actual text. 5. Some document formats can contain multiple data types. This includes text, images, embedded information from another file, and formatting. Non text information that is not saved directly within the document will not be included in a file upload. This includes references to a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet included within a Microsoft Office Word document. 6. Users whose files are saved in a file type that is not accepted by Turnitin will need to use a word processing program to save the file as one of the accepted types. Rich Text Format and Plain Text file types are nearly universally available in word processing software. Neither file type will support images or non text data within the file. Plain text format does not support any formatting, and rich text format supports only limited formatting options.