E-Learning: Turnitin

The past few weeks at work have been full of training. It being the end of term and near the summer holidays there have been lots of sessions crammed in all over the show.

One of these sessions was a preview of a program called Turnitin and it introduced me to a very good resource.

Turnitin is a program where teachers can upload students coursework. It then searches the internet looking for any plagiarism and highlights this for either the student or the teacher to look at, depending how it is set up. Not only does it search the internet for sources, but it also keeps hold of the particular document in a separate database so that future submissions can be checked against previous work, allowing tutors to check if students have copied each other. AND it also searches the databases of other institutions which are using the software too, so it could tell you if students have copied work from further afield! 

How good is that! 

The only down side I have noticed so far is that it did not search our e-book catalogue, which is quiet easy to copy and paste things from. Could it be that turnitin only works with word documents and cannot search PDFs or any of the many other file formats used by e-books?

Maybe if there was some way to attach the e-book catalogue to the search parameters this could be fixed? Or it could be a case of copying entire e-books into the system as 'coursework' in order for it to be searchable? This would be quiet a pain to do. I will have to raise my ideas/concerns with the very capable people in our IT and E-Learning departments and see what they say!

Any ways here is a screen shot of the turnitin website and the link to it too incase you wanted to have a look see :-)

http://turnitin.com/