[Go to File > Properties to amend this text, then right click here to update this field]
Section name
The TurnItIn Building Block addition to Blackboard, the University of Reading’s virtual learning environment centrepiece was piloted during the academic year 2009-2010 by around fifteen members of staff in various Faculties and Departments across the University.
Other staff also showed interest subsequently joining the TurnItIn Building Block
Blackboard group, though several have not yet progressed from this point. Many of these members of staff had previously used the ‘traditional’ method of submitting students’ assignments’ to submit.ac.uk .
During the academic year 2009-2010 over three hundred students have used the TurnItIn
Building Block to submit assignments. TurnItIn, an example of electronic detection software, received its national licence in 2003 and is now used by 97% of Higher Education
Institutions.
The objective of the evaluation
The pilot of the TurnItIn Building Block set out to evaluate the proficiency of the tool as well as its pedagogical purpose. The pilot’s University-wide scope investigated the guidance and policy in relation to plagiarism and the use of TurnItIn that pertains in Schools and
Departments across the University as well as demonstrating examples of best practise.
Comments from piloting staff remain anonymous. Resources that detail technical guidance, pedagogical aspects and provide exemplar models of use are available from the CDoTL website: www.reading.ac.uk/cdotl
An overview of TurnItIn and Blackboard
The review of the pilot study initially asked staff to provide an account of their previous experience of TurnItIn and the ‘traditional’ method of uploading bulk .zip
files to submit.ac.uk
. Presently, it remains possible to have students submit assessed work to the
Blackboard Assignment tool within a course from which point a member of staff may extract all the files into a compressed .zip
package which can then be submitted to TurnItIn as a single step. This old-fashioned method achieves something similar to the add-on module we are piloting but requires someone to go and manually get the .zip
file and then upload it to TurnItIn. The TurnItIn Building Block makes the process more efficient by removing this middle step.
In addition to making submission and originality checking more efficient, the Instructor(s) of a Blackboard course can decide if they would like students to see the ‘Originality Report’ that TurnItIn generates for their submitted document. Another option allows Instructors to
©University of Reading 2010 Friday, 24 June 2010 Page 1

CDoTL Report on the Blackboard TurnItIn Building Block T H Koller decide whether or not they want the students’ documents to be stored in the TurnItIn database for future submissions to be checked against. Note that if this option is not enabled then it is not possible to check for ‘collusion’ within a course, as TurnItIn can only check against existing database submissions and Internet sources.
Questions posed to staff
The following questions were asked to staff by telephone, email or personal meeting.
Reponses have been grouped to provide a reviewed and concise overview.
1.
Had you previously used the ‘traditional’ submit.ac.uk TurnItIn method?
2.
If so, how does the integrated version compare with the ‘traditional’ method?
3.
When you set up the TurnItIn building block, did you encounter any problems or receive any queries from students?
4.
For what purpose did you use the TurnItIn building block? For style or ease of submitting, testing the students, or as teaching technique.
5.
Did you allow students to view Originality Reports?
6.
What was your policy or advice to students regarding how they should interpret their Originality Reports?
7.
What was this policy or advice based on? School instructions, Faculty?
8.
What guidance would you have liked from the University?
9.
What support have you found necessary along the way?
10.
How will you progress from your TurnItIn experience in future years?
Problems encountered by staff and students
The majority of responses from the surveyed respondents indicated relatively few problems other than those that were due to isolated instances and incompatibilities. One user from the School of Arts, English and Communication Design who had not used the ‘traditional’ means of submitting work to TurnItIn found the method was ‚very easy to set up and [to] modify the different functionalities of it.‛
Of the issues that were noted as difficulties, these were predominantly technical. An
Instructor from the School of Mathematics, Meteorology and Physics reported several staff and students had not received receipts for submitted work which they had later found in a junk mail folder. Some students had more particular problems in uploading their material;
‚although I had demonstrated to the students how to use TurnItIn, some of them didn't manage to upload their work. They found it confusing.‛
Some students were noted as uploading the wrong material and then were not able to replace it with the correct content. Whilst in such instances it is possible for the Instructor to resubmit work on behalf of a student, it may illustrate ‚a weakness of the tool,‛ or certainly an aspect which does not necessarily support claims from TurnItIn asserting the
Building Block’s simplification of its originality checking service.
Guidance beyond that provided in the standard TurnItIn documentation was necessary for one particular module that was piloting the Building Block. Here, there was need to elaborate on the definitions of the differences between the paper and revision style of
TurnItIn Assignment that may be created through Blackboard. Wanting to encourage formative development an assignment had been set up. Students submitted their work and were then given access to originality reports. Students were able to re-work that assignment for its next submission months later. Unfortunately if the option to search the ‘submitted papers repository’ is selected (which is the default option upon setting up an assignment in
©University of Reading 2010 Tuesday, 13 July 2010 Page 2

CDoTL Report on the Blackboard TurnItIn Building Block T H Koller the Building Block) the similarity index from TurnItIn regards this as unoriginal work, with some changes being made if the student has particularly edited their work. The revision assignment can remedy this issue, though this is not sufficiently clear, and if left unaided, the exercise may be viewed as self-defeating.
Another issue encountered is that if a member of staff at another university found a close match between work submitted to TurnItIn by one of their students and work submitted by one of the University of Reading’s students, they would usually send an email request for access to the TurnItIn Administrator at Reading (often someone from within CDoTL). For the most part this process works fine. However, at a recent TurnItIn UK User Group, it was reported that when using the TurnItIn Building Block the automated message request for access would go to all Instructors listed for the Blackboard course instead. The email may look like it has been written by someone but, in fact, is automatically generated and so in replying it is possible you might inadvertently reveal details of the Reading student to the contact name in another university. Having said this, such requests from other universities are normally infrequent.
A potential problem has also been identified that may arise for Instructors with ‘traditional’ website access to TurnItIn Currently there is no integration of work submitted to a member of staff via the Building Block method and the work seen by the same member of staff if they login to TurnItIn via the ‘traditional’ submit.ac.uk
route. In the worst case, resetting a password actually caused a temporary loss of access to the material in the main web site.
This problem will be rectified at some future date but until then it is recommended staff with student work already stored in their website based TurnItIn account continue with this method. Equally, if an Instructor needs to cooperate with other staff, who are already using submit.ac.uk
, both should use the traditional method until proper integration between the two methods is achieved.
Models of use for the TurnItIn building block
Responses here understandably varied considerably. Instructors opted into the pilot purely for style, to reduce administrative pressures, to receive assistance in detecting plagiarism, to ease student submissions, or due its usefulness as a formative teaching tool. Some respondents, such as those piloting the Building Block in the School of Law and the School of Mathematics, Meteorology and Physics referred to a desire to improve their teaching technique. Staff not wanting its use to be encapsulating, such as those involved Instructors in the School of Systems Engineering, asserted that the student awareness of the system may discourage students writing from the heart, in that they may be writing to the requirement of ‘passing’ the Originality Report. Indeed, this may be especially the case with students whose first language is not English. It is claimed that, ‚students may commit to the reports too readily in efforts to improve their writing habits‛.
One example from the School of Law, ‚wanted to educate the students regarding plagiarism and teach students how to avoid plagiarising. That's why we gave them the opportunity to access their originality reports and re-submit their work if they needed too.‛ As well as assisting in detecting plagiarism, Instructors at the School of Law recognised its potential for, ‚formative essay development... with students being allowed to submit more than once, each time generating reports for the first part of their assignment, with the entire first part being re-marked later in the year, allowing them to respond to criticism both from the marking team and from TurnItIn‛.
©University of Reading 2010 Tuesday, 13 July 2010 Page 3

CDoTL Report on the Blackboard TurnItIn Building Block T H Koller
Diverse use of TurnItIn settings
Once more, practise across Departments and Faculties varied greatly, responding to the variety of options that are presented when setting up a TurnItIn Assignment (see Fig. 1).
Some Instructors using the tool allowed students to submit as many times as they wished up until the deadline. The Department of Film, Theatre and Television explained that they valued the ‚purpose of TurnItIn and stressed the use of the effective tool to check [student] work and see in practice different forms of plagiarism‛, allowing staff to monitor student work during submission and immediately engaging them in the process of feedback.
Certain rules have been devised to clarify this process in select Schools. In the School of
Mathematics, Meteorology and Physics, one Instructor creates a log for each generated with each Originality Report. In this is documented all ‘matched sources’ in a particular report that have a +1% match, a record is made of the top three sources and if students have matched parts of their work with other students this too is logged.
This particular Instructor’s outlook may have been influenced by two severe cases of plagiarism for the course since it began seven years ago. Staff at this School ‚feel that rather than forcing students to limbo under some TurnItIn-bar in order to get the [similarity index] down to some number that they think is reasonable, making the act of writing entirely artificial, that students should be better taught at how not to plagiarise‛. Without guidance, the School feel they have little option but to not allow student access to TurnItIn.
Positively, TurnItIn (the traditional method being used) can exclude ‚vanilla language‛ from reports, either through the use of a rubric or through the individual selection of matched sources in each Originality Report. Whilst this may require an initial resource or time contribution for each assignment, once completed it will be contained in the annual rollover that Blackboard performs.
Advice given to students regarding interpreting Originality Reports
With all respondents who provided Originality Reports none gave specific advice as to how to interpret them, either to staff or to students. Content and documentation on Blackboard courses in some cases encouraged students to review the generated reports but no guidance or policy was to be found in any School or Department.
Using the building block for Dissertations in the School of Mathematics, Meteorology and
Physics, one Instructor who was supervising six students individually went through the submitted Originality Reports. Whilst no advice was given to students on how to interpret the reports, when students met with staff to discuss the findings (group discussions could also work if class sizes were to increase, though this would not be made compulsory as is does seem to give weaker students more). The reports provided a useful way of initiating conversations, often beginning with basic issues, such as how to cite etc.
At other institutions in the UK the procedure is clarified to a greater extent 1 . Many have produced guides which explain both the technical aspects to setting up TurnItIn to function
2
as well as having contributing resources documenting the potential pedagogical uses. The summary of policies from other UK institutions below may provide an initial starting point from which TurnItIn guidance could be made available:
 clarity as to the TurnItIn mandate that is matching words from a selection of sources and is not a plagiarism checking tool. The similarity index provides a percentage
1
Summaries made from comments from SOAS, City University, Institute of Education, School of
Pharmacy, University of Glamorgan, Bloomsbury Group, University of York and Loughborough
University
2
CDoTL have produced a comprehensive alternative that is available in the Blackboard Help tab
©University of Reading 2010 Tuesday, 13 July 2010 Page 4

CDoTL Report on the Blackboard TurnItIn Building Block T H Koller indicating what is not original. It is up to individual instructors to then judge whether the work has been plagiarised;
 institutional policies governing use of TurnItIn. These may include how for each assignment either all submissions or none must be checked and how each student must have one formative experience of TurnItIn before submitting summative coursework; and,
 seeing benefits from incorporating formative use of TurnItIn into student training on academic honesty, information skills, anti-plagiarism and referencing. In some cases training is delivered by academics, sometimes by the library, and sometimes with input from various sources. Several group Instructors have reported great value in the formative uses of TurnItIn, as students were able to learn about plagiarism without fear of getting in trouble.
Embedding this sort of training of formative assessment will naturally take time and would come either in the form of submitting a non-assessed piece to see what their report looks like, or allowing students to view their report generated for assessed coursework. It has been suggested that formative use works best when tied in with assessment and not done as an isolated exercise.
An example of best practise from the University of York
The University of York has established a comprehensive course within Yorkshare , their
Blackboard virtual learning environment. The course is a cornerstone for all academic writing with a specific section dedicated to the enhancement of student dissertations. Pages within the course provide pedagogical and technical guides centred on TurnItIn, general writing style, vocabulary as well as a FAQ page on common mistakes. There is also a video demonstrating how TurnItIn operates from the perspective of a student, a quiz and a discussion board that allow for interaction and feedback.
The resources in the course are ample and broad. Information that is clearly made accessible to staff and students alike illustrates that TurnItIn is not a definitive plagiarism detection tool (See Fig. 2). This may fuel minority concerns that have been voiced at the University of
Reading as to the merits of TurnItIn transparency for students. Some of those Instructors piloting the TurnItIn Building Block offer the view that such student awareness may allow for instances of individuals seeking to identify strategies to try and ‘beat’ TurnItIn.
Alternatively, such awareness may lead to students writing to satisfy the TurnItIn criteria for originality and not the wider University curriculum. The University of York encourages student education as to the tools that will monitor possible instances of plagiarism.
Importantly the Develop Your Academic Writing course that Yorkshare offers, provides the option for students who are having difficulty interpreting their TurnItIn Originality Report to send a confidential enquiry to skills experts via a private blog. The course also provides guidance for specific writing techniques, notably on referencing, paraphrasing, summarising, synthesising, originality, quoting and academic integrity.
From the research conducted amongst those Instructors piloting the TurnItIn Building Block it appears that the University of Reading is in an opportune position to develop a space with similar parameters. This may act as a central resource from which all Schools and
Departments engaging with TurnItIn Assignments may pay regard to, as well as directly demonstrating services offered with attendant students. Alternatively, it is also possible that particular content of such a course as that the University of York may be integrated into complimenting courses at the University of Reading that already focus on students’ skills and development. An example of this is the LW1LS Legal Skills course that the School of
Law currently provides to all Part 1 students undertaking the LLB Law undergraduate degree programme. Within its learning outcomes the course seeks to instil students with
©University of Reading 2010 Tuesday, 13 July 2010 Page 5

CDoTL Report on the Blackboard TurnItIn Building Block T H Koller transferable academic writing skills. A handbook that clarifies much of what is taught accompanies the module
3
. Such an approach may further distribute the disparate methodologies seemingly in place in those Schools and Departments undertaking the pilot programme.
Guidance and the future development of TurnItIn
The pilot programme has clearly established the need for guidance for the interpretation of
Originality Reports which may account for different circumstances that may occur in different Schools and Departments. This would allow students using the TurnItIn
Assignment Building Block to be at a stage where they could engage with the report, fulfilling the potential for formative and summative development.
Currently, CDoTL has published comprehensive technical guidance for the setting up of the integrated means of using TurnItIn. CDoTL plan to increase this resource pool, offering
PowerPoint presentations to staff and that may be used to inform students regarding the pedagogical benefits and implications the Building Block entails. An interpretation of the
Develop Your Academic Writing course that the University of York have shared with several
Departments at the University of Reading would work to educate students about the tool at the beginning of their University career, allowing them to submit work where it may be checked. Already in place in the LW1RWS Research and Writing Skills module at the School of Law is a process whereby students submit an assignment that is passed through TurnItIn, following an independent student review of the Originality Report, students are then allowed a final submission. University-wide resources may require active involvement by
Student Services, the library, and study advisors.
The TurnItIn Building Block provides ample scope for formative development of student assessment in novel ways as well as simplifying and structuring the means by which
Instructors may submit work via Blackboard. The LW1RWS Research and Writing Skills module at the School of Law intends to continue their use of formative education. The
Module Convenor intends to develop a means of presenting a guide to interpreting
Originality Reports that would cover both how to find and review them and why they may be useful and important for students in the formative and summative development of their work. Presenting such lectures once students have their own specific Originality Reports in their possession permits such training to be directly applied.
Guidance in this instance may take the form of a video that would be accessible throughout the duration of the course as well as sustainable from one year to the next. Such a video would form the basis of at least part of a designated introductory lecture for the course in the next academic year. ‚These lectures will explain among other things, how students should interpret the originality report and a slight explanation of the similarity index, which is known to scare students with large percentages of which the meaning they might not understand‛. The course has previously been centred on independent research. Such a willingness to alter the longstanding presentation of the course may indicate strong support for the potential benefits of TurnItIn.
Other Departments have shared similar sentiments, being ‚happy to start using TurnItIn progressively in all the modules, as it is a very straightforward tool for essay submission, education around plagiarism and plagiarism detection.‛ Another Instructor ‚explained to the students the purpose of TurnItIn and stressed the use of the effective tool which enables them to check their work and see in practice different forms of plagiarism. TurnItIn offers a useful experience to the students as they can monitor their work before submission.‛
3
Kleinhans, M-M., & Smith, C., (2008) Legal Skills: a Guide , School of Law, University of Reading
©University of Reading 2010 Tuesday, 13 July 2010 Page 6

CDoTL Report on the Blackboard TurnItIn Building Block T H Koller
Forward thinking
Several Schools and Departments that had not yet participated in the pilot programme showed definitive interest in expanding their current practises to purposely include the use of the TurnItIn Building Block. One in particular, the Department of English and American
Literature expressed considerable interest. The Department is currently in the process of supporting all of their modules with a corresponding Blackboard course, with this process to be completed before the new academic year (September 2010). Consulted members of the
Department are interested in adopting the integrated method of the TurnItIn Building Block both for its benefit regarding online plagiarism and originality detection as well as for its potential to offer formative development. Despite this interest, certain aspects are holding the Department back. They foresee ‚difficulties in interpreting the originality reports as well as judging the apt similarity index‛. If such concerns can be addressed the Department is likely to roll out the use of TurnItIn in their courses beginning with a Departmental pilot.
Similarly, there is the practise of the International Study and Language Centre (ISLC) which currently use the submit.ac.uk
‘traditional’ method for TurnItIn submissions. Predominantly, for academic and language programmes and principally with pre-sessional English courses, student assessment in this Department takes the form of two project submissions. The first of these is used as a learning tool to which they supplement student study with a handbook containing relevant sections on how students can prevent plagiarism within their work and reasons why students may feel the need to plagiarise. Instructors are expectant of plagiarised work, largely due to the unfamiliarity of the use of the English language for many of the ISLC’s students. The TurnItIn Building Block would further raise awareness regarding plagiarism and would also allow for formative learning through teaching overtly in this manner. Along with the abovementioned formative advantages that the ISLC have noted, they also benefit from the summative aspects of TurnItIn submissions, with significantly lower levels of plagiarism in students’ final assessment. It is hoped that this will continue into subsequent study.
The second project has two draft submissions, with Instructors providing students with sufficient time to address concerns regarding plagiarism. In some cases, Instructors have shown students paper examples of the TurnItIn report when issues have needed to be qualified. This would be introduced in a ‘show and tell’ style as a means of differentiating between plagiarism and much of the other documentations that students are presented with. Such an exercise is not standard practise, though if it occurs individual students would be invited to consult their own submitted work as well as Originality Reports so they may understand as well as feed-forward to their own essay writing development. Discussion regarding Originality Reports is purposely kept general, with Instructors for the majority setting out principles of plagiarism and how TurnItIn may assist in maintaining these.
Details such as the specific plateaus of the TurnItIn Similarity Index that would be acceptable are not discussed.
Before using the submit.ac.uk
TurnItIn method, the ISLC’s staff were dubious with giving reports regarding plagiarism back to students. This was particularly due to a majority of students being international or mature students with whom they want conflict to arise over assertions of plagiarism. Also, the wide-ranging topics in the pre-sessional classes that could be covered meant Instructors would have less informed academic judgement regarding plagiarism. In these classes, project titles are usually allocated by the Schools or
Departments that the ISLC students are joining.
If adopted, the TurnItIn Building Block will assist and simplify the advantages that
Instructors have already noted in using TurnItIn as a plagiarism tool. Wary of postgraduate and mature students submitting papers constantly in efforts to discover ways of ‘beating the system’, Instructors would carefully select the conditions on which students receive their
©University of Reading 2010 Tuesday, 13 July 2010 Page 7

CDoTL Report on the Blackboard TurnItIn Building Block T H Koller
Originality Reports. This brings to the fore criticisms of TurnItIn that have been widely deliberated by other institutions with far greater implementation of the TurnItIn software.
Concerns are levelled at the possibility that presenting such software and educating students about its facility may be opening the ‘black box’ of plagiarism detection
4
. Indeed raising awareness may lead to an ‘arms race of detection and evasion’
5
detracting from the good practise the software intends to instil.
Concluding remarks
Different departments will naturally adopt differing strategies owing to the multi-level ambit of the TurnItIn Building Block. Whilst such diversity must not be discouraged it is important to maintain the University of Reading’s equality of provision across all
Departments and Faculties.
Certain Schools and Departments, such as the School of Law, are considering using the
TurnItIn Building Block for all e-submissions. Whilst this is not to suggest that everything a student submits need necessarily be checked by attendant academic staff, structuring
Blackboard courses to integrate TurnItIn within Blackboard, would enable the facility for this to be possible at a later stage, to check instances of potential plagiarism without the possibility of student profiling. In this way, the threat that the essay might be checked is a powerful deterrent, particularly if some (random) checking is actually done.
Efforts taken to set up as well as invigilate the TurnItIn Building Block, which provides a more at-hand supply of information as to possible instances of plagiarism, may be better pooled into improving student writing and referencing skills. Indeed, successful introductions of the TurnItIn Building Block at other UK institutions have come jointly with resources to improve student practises. These take the form of guides regarding what makes good academic writing and research and provide informal means of quizzing what has been presented, with attached unimpeachable support as well. Such resources go beyond mere new means of detecting an age-old academic issue, whether inadvertent plagiarism or active collusion, to introduce the idea of academic staff making a radical shift
6
in the way in which they teach students.
Such a central resource, such as that created by the Univeristy of York (see Fig. 3), whilst not prescribing set policy for all Schools and Departments offers models of use as well as demonstrating TurnItIn as a means of detecting non-original text as well as a means of providing formative development to students in their academic work. Resources and documentation that should be provided in order to greater explain the ambit and provision of TurnItIn are to cover; accessing and navigating the TurnItIn Originality Reports, the
Similarity Index and achieved scores as well as what students should do next following such reports. The TurnItIn Building Block may help educate students in both their academic writing and research whilst also teaching about plagiarism in a means that is learning-bydoing, however it will require initial and sustained efforts be it at an individual course level or centrally.
Further information
Contact the e-Learning team at e-learning-help@reading.ac.uk
4
Dahl, S., (2007) ‚The role of TurnItIn within the Formative Process of Academic Writing‛, 8:2 Active
Learning In Higher Education , 172-191.
5
Badge, J., & Scott, J., (2009) ‚Dealing with Plagiarism in the Digital Age‛, Unpublished, University of
Leicester , at p6.
6
Warn, J., (2006) Plagiarism Software: No Magic Bullet! 25 Higher Education Research and Development ,
195-208.
©University of Reading 2010 Tuesday, 13 July 2010 Page 8

CDoTL Report on the Blackboard TurnItIn Building Block
Figure 1
T H Koller
©University of Reading 2010 Tuesday, 13 July 2010 Page 9

CDoTL Report on the Blackboard TurnItIn Building Block
Figure 2
T H Koller
©University of Reading 2010 Tuesday, 13 July 2010 Page 10

CDoTL Report on the Blackboard TurnItIn Building Block
Figure 3
T H Koller
©University of Reading 2010 Tuesday, 13 July 2010 Page 11