A major issue facing Higher Education is plagiarism. It is relatively simple for people to claim another’s work as their own with the internet and copy/paste tools. To assist in detecting suspected plagiarised work, Blackboard has access to Turnitin, the plagiarism detection service operated in the UK through JISC: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/whatwedo/programmes/plagiarism/archive/detection.aspx
Assignments can be sent individually to Turnitin or as a batch (zip file). Turnitin is a useful visual indicator of possible plagiarism in student work. Clicking on the Originality will show a learners script with sections highlighted in different colours from Red to Blue. Alongside the coloured highlight is a reference to the website or work that has matched what the learner has uploaded in the script.
Blue highlighting on a returned student script would suggest a low probability of plagiarism.
Red on the other hand would suggest a high probability of plagiarism.
Figure 1. Example of how assignments are presented in the section “TurnitinUK assignments” under the category “Course Tools” of the Course Management panel.
Also, by clicking on the GradeMark button, you can
- leave a comment on the script;
- type inside the text providing feedback to students;
- leave a voice comment; and
- apply Rubric percentage to student’s grade.
Note: If you click on the “File” (Figure 1), you can download students’ assignments either as a Microsoft Word file or as pdf file.
Other tools for supporting assessment-TurnitinUK by Maria Limniou is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Computers in Education and not only 