[ARCHIVED] What issues have you had with integrating Canvas with TurnItIn

[snugent]

We will be integrating Canvas with TurnItIn this summer. What issues may crop up during this process? How helpful is TurnItIn support?

[striglej]

We have not really had any issues.  We also have not really needed Turnitin support.

I have had complaints from faculty who had a lot of custom grade marks in Turnitin.  They don't like losing those in the integration and go back to using direct Turnitin submissions.  If someone knows how to get their custom marks into the integrated view, I would love to know it.

The only other confusion comes up from the settings.  All of your options for what you want Turnitin to check and whether you want the papers to go into the database or not are all in the additional settings. 

There is also a message you can give them notifying them that their paper will become part of the database and asking them to acknowledge that it is their original work etc.

It really is a helpful integration.

[snugent]

Thanks  @striglej ​! That is very helpful. Good to know about the Grademarks. I am pretty sure we don't have many people who were using TurnItIn for grading so hopeful that will not be an issue for us.

[dhulsey · Accepted solution]

Hi,  @striglej . Instructors can import and export Quickmarks and rubrics for backup, sharing, or moving from one Turnitin integration to another. Please see the attached images for a quick tutorial.

i Hope that helps!

[Cindy_Masek]

We integrated last fall when we first moved to Canvas.  We only had a few faculty using web-based Turnitin in its most basic form at the time.  The integration has been wonderful.  Now many if not most faculty use it.

Something I hadn't anticipated was the number of students who wanted to use TII to self-check their work for courses or assignments not using TII.  To remedy this, I created a generic assignment in a non-academic course in which all students and faculty are enrolled.  The "assignment" very clearly states that if they use this "assignment" and then are required to submit assignment in a actual course through TII, it will come back as plagiarized.  (I know that within a single assignment you can have multiple submissions to TII provided there is enough time for the subsequent submissions, but with the submission being to two different assignments in different courses I believe that it will treat it as plagiarized.)

The second thing that happened involved adjunct faculty who had never worked with TII as an integrated product and were used to only using it in the web-based format.  They and their students were asking for codes and passwords and at first I didn't understand what they were looking for.  However, we all soon realized that this information was unnecessary in an integrated setting.

We also have found TII's many webinars great for training faculty for how to use the product as well as about academic integrity issues and writing skill development in general.

[striglej]

For your generic assignment, you could go into the settings and turn off the submission to the database, which would keep subsequent submissions from coming back plagiarized. 

Our faculty have two very different philosophies on this:

1. TII will help students learn what behaviors constitute plagiarism and improve their writing.

or

2. A "Free" TII submission will let students see what the system is capable of catching so that they can modify their paper just enough so that their cheating isn't detected.

If students were asking to submit their paper to Turnitin, I would go with option 2.  When you write a paper, you know whether you have used the same words as your source and whether you have given citations.  You may not know whether you have properly formatted your in-text citations or your works cited page but TII isn't going to tell you that anyway.  I don't see any benefit to having the students submit on their own but some do.

[Cindy_Masek]

That is a great idea Josh! I will turn it off so it doesn't submit it.  Not having used TII myself much, I can't claim to be the expert on its use. I leave that to a few faculty.  But as the admin setting items up as needed, that is very good piece of information.

Gauging from the students who I see using this generic option, they are the high performers who aren't likely to plagiarize to begin with. They just want another way to double/triple check themselves.  They are well aware that citations aren't guaranteed. The primarily thing faculty, and I believe students, are looking for is unintentional plagiarism through failure to appropriately paraphrase or failure to cite, but not as far as how to cite.  We use

[Cindy_Masek]

So I go to change TII to not keep the submission and discovered I had already done that some time ago.  I wonder where my memory went that day without me?! Lol!

[striglej]

See you're so good you even surprise yourself sometimes.

[r_v_jones]

We are presently using the Canvas assignment tool, which has the option of submitting to Turnitin. Sadly we have had a few issues. i.e. the Turnitin API not LTI

1. Student submissions in Canvas appearing in speedgrader but having no score, this is sometimes due to the submission file size being too great (over 400 pages or 20MB) Canvas does not display the error, so we designed a custom report. (yes dummy data shown here so don't worry)

2.  The Submissions not always showing an originality report quickly, possibly due to Turnitin being slow.

3.Multiple appearance of students work in Turnitin. If a student or staff user encounters a problem and the option appears to resubmit there can already be a Turnitin report for the submission but canvas is not displaying it. If you resubmit then it sends the submission again and results in another originality report for the same submission appear in the Turnitin system. 

We’ve created a support site specifically for this https://canvas.bham.ac.uk/courses/1349/pages/turnitin-no-score-visible

Hope this helps

[scottdennis]

 @dhulsey ​ has posted some very detailed documentation and feedback regarding turnitin​ integration (both LTI and API) that you will want to check out if you haven't seen it already.

[sbreeyear]

We had nothing but trouble with our TII integration, and TII support wasn't particularly helpful during it.  It was a long and painful process, since there was a pent-up demand for using the product and we had to integrate it right at the beginning of the semester. The biggest issue seemed to be that the vendor who was "helping" would blame the vendor who was not involved in the conversation, so it was hard to ferret out what the real problem was.  TII would tell us to set up a TII assignment one way, and Canvas would tell us to set it up another way, so as new users of both products, we were totally confused.  I will say, however, that once the integration finally stabilized at the end of the fall semester, it became extremely popular and is now being used with ease, so I guess it was worth the initial hassle.  I suspect things are easier now that the integration has been going on for a year--we were integrating during the early stages.  Good luck!

[S9300807]

We are experiencing several weird issues.  If a student changes their default email address in Canvas, the student's previous TurnItIn account is deleted in TurnItIn and the student can no longer submit papers for originaility scan.  The message seen in Canvas is

"Updating user information failed because user email was changed to an address that is already associated with an account. UID: 92979_user_43652 - Old Email: xxxxx@students.katyisd.org - New Email: xxxxx@gmail.com"

We have Canvas set so that students cannot delete their District email address but there is the ability to change the default.  Canvas sent me to TurnItIn and TurnItIn sends me to Canvas so we are stuck in a no support cycle. 

The second issue is that a student has a TurnItIn account and is submitting jsut fine and then for one Assignment it will be stuck in Canvas on "TurnItIn is still processing the file".  Canvas can see the file in Canvas but TurnItIn has not received it. 

Any help???? 

[r_v_jones]

S9300807​ we've had hte same issue with email address here and the issue with students not being able to submit.

We've notivced it only started happening about 2 months ago

[S9300807]

TurnItIn said today that the email change should not impact the student account.  Leads me to believe that something was changed in the API. 

[dhulsey]

A change in Turnitin's end seems likely. Last I checked, they released an update around the start of June that introduced some changes. When dealing with Turnitin support, I find that a Screencast gets a much quicker and better response than verbal descriptions, so it might be worth a try to do a screencast to show their support that the email change does impact something.

In the meantime, perhaps the student can see the value in restoring his institutional email in Canvas?

I hope that helps, Susan!

[vrs07nl]

we have the same issue with default emial setting - have had to try an impress on students NOT to change their default email setting. We have also taken additional measures for users with corporate email logins - we have set these to still be accepted for log in purposes and set up auto redirects from their student email accounts

to their corporate emails. Thye can still add other emials if wish to - so long as NOT set as default