Upload file to Turnitin as Tutor

[chiruley]

I would like to upload a file to Turnitin as a Tutor. 

The current stage of my students' essay assignment is on a preliminary stage, and I don't want them to extend their concerns with Turnitin just yet. Nevertheless, I would like to analyse some of these assignments, to get a holistic understanding of the current integrity of the document. That said, how do I upload or create an assignment where I can upload some of my students' PDFs to Turnitin?

Thank you.

[tross]

You may need to talk to someone in your institution.  Depending on how your institution is setup, it may not be possible.  It would not work in our institution.  

[dhulsey]

chiruley‌. This could be tricky. For one thing, if you do get access to Turnitin to check student work, you will likely want to use their web portal, not the Turnitin integration with Canvas.  However, if the students later submitted to Turnitin themselves for a final draft, then you would get a report with false matches because the rough drafts and final drafts would show up as matching.

The easier path is to set up an assignment in Canvas in the class the students are taking -- as long as you have instructor level permissions ( I am not sure if you are using "tutor" as a synonym for instructor?). In the optional settings, you can set it so that the students cannot see the originality reports. 

You can take a look at https://community.canvaslms.com/groups/plagiarism/blog/2015/04/18/canvas-and-turnitin?sr=search&sear...‌ for a guide on using the Turnitin LTI in a Canvas course. Does that help? 

[chiruley]

Dear Dallas,

Thanks for the reply. To my understanding I thought it was possible to create a test/fake student, where the tutor/instructor was then able to upload the file, acting on its behalf. In hindsight, I see that your solution would have worked perfectly in the draft evaluation process. Nevertheless, this assignment has now been closed and I would like to use Turnitin myself. 

I will ask my library to see if we have any alternative solutions.

Best,

Javier

[ericwerth]

Hello chiruley.  I agree with  @dhulsey , but wanted to add that if there is a box for drafts set up in TurnItIn in a future class or you find a way of submitting the assignments prior to when students will submit their final paper, there is a way to prevent these from being indexed in the standard repository.  In this way, the student's final work won't show similarity to the draft.  This is accomplished in the settings of TurnItIn itself.  I will post a few images below.

The library is a good resource.  I know that at some institutions the library has a general TII submission box set up so that students working with the librarians can submit draft assignments.

[dhulsey]

Hey, ericwerth‌. If drafts are submitted within the same Canvas class, you do not need to tell Turnitin to exclude rough drafts from the repository. Turnitin now recognizes that the submissions come from the same student in the same class. I mention this because I have mixed feelings about it when I learned of it from a Turnitin employee a few weeks ago, so I thought I would mention it here. I can't quite put my finger on what I dislike about it. Perhaps it is just a tiny loss of control? I am not sure!

[ericwerth]

Wow!  Thanks for the information  @dhulsey !  That is pretty incredible.  I'll need to do some additional research into this to make sure I understand how TII knows what is the draft and final.  Do the file names need to be identical?  

I would agree that I really don't like the system determining when to exclude something.  I much preferred to have one box for rough drafts that I told the system to exclude and another for the final draft later in the class that I ensured were included in the repository.

Thanks again....another new thing I learned today!

[dhulsey]

Hey, Eric. The file names do not need to be identical. My best guess is that it uses the name of the class. I say this because when you create assignments in the LTI, you can see them through the Turnitin website as being grouped into a class with the same name as your Canvas course. I tested at the end of the fall term by posting a rough draft and final draft assignment for students in canvas without changing the repository settings in Turnitin. The rough draft did not show as matching the final draft. 

[dhulsey]

You do get a test student in Canvas, but the test student usually cannot access external tools because the test student does not have a Canvas profile, so the external tool can't tell if it should allow the test student access. What you can do is go to the Turnitin website and login there to use the quick submit feature. Here is a tutorial:

[KimberlyLogan-H]

Thank you for this explanation. When it comes time to utilize Turnitin I will use your guidance.

[Robbie_Grant]

 @parada ,

Were you able to find an answer to your question? I am going to go ahead and mark this question as answered because there hasn't been any more activity in a while so I assume that you have the information that you need. If you still have a question about this or if you have information that you would like to share with the community, by all means, please do come back and leave a comment.  Also, if this question has been answered by one of the previous replies, please feel free to mark that answer as correct.

Robbie

[ethomas48]

I'd like to upload a paper as my Test Student, so that I can demonstrate how students can see the comments that I provide in the TII mark-up tool. 

I could do this in Blackboard but cannot seem to do this with the way Canvas is integrated with TII.

Work-arounds appreciated!

[tross]

We create a student demo account that we used for training.  We added them to a master course.  The Test Student in Canvas does not work with the LTI