Admins and Turnitin

[Boekenoogen]

I know we all have been affected by Turnitin in one form or another. With the major changes they are announcing this summer, do any Canvas Admins feel that one of the biggest items that Turnitin is missing is the ability for admins to make changes to Turnitin settings without having to add themselves to the course (shell).  I recently bought this issue up at the Canvas Meet the Partners Webinar and the answer from Turnitin was that they didn't think it was a big issue.

Am I the only Canvas Admin that has to review 100+ courses and having to add myself to each course just to make sure that Turnitin setting is set is crazy. 

Am I alone in this matter?

[rmthomas]

I am too new to Canvas to help you out, but from reading your post I found out that Turnitin is going to have major changes this summer. So, I appreciate finding that out. We are currently piloting Canvas, but our go live date is May 29th and we do have Turnitin integrated into Canvas. Thanks for the heads up.

[jbond]

Hi: I totally felt your pain when we actively used the LTI at our institution in 2016-2017 and complained to our TII rep often. However, this year we are running both the LTI and the legacy API behind the admin curtain but have all faculty to use the legacy API. I do not have to add myself to manage the API settings. I was given a sneak peek at the Canvas Plagiarism Framework (CPF) when I met with my TII rep recently and it appears that this may also be the case for the CPF -- no need to add yourself to the course to make changes as an admin. I recommend contacting your TII rep to ask them directly about this issue.

[lindalee]

Hi John Boekenoogen,

I complete agree that this is a source of frustration -- we routinely add ourselves as TAs to courses in order to create, manage, troubleshoot, or otherwise interact with the Turnitin Assignment Dashboard for Turnitin LTI assignments in Canvas. We also fielded many questions from our departmental tech support and admin staff about why they could see or interact with Turnitin LTI assignments. I agree that this was a missed opportunity for Turnitin to offset some of the frustration of the LTI integration through recognizing a Canvas admin role and treating someone with that role as a teaching team member.

As Jill Bond noted, we expect that the Turnitin integration with the new Canvas Plagiarism Framework will offer some significant relief from this extra step.

-Linda

[rake_9]

Lack of access for account-level roles is an issue with any "purely" LTI tool, in my understanding and experience.  We, too, are looking forward to installing the new plagiarism framework.  My understanding is that this will provide 2 options: users can check a box and use TII with a relatively small set of TII options plus access to the Canvas Assignment tools settings, or users can use the external tools options to leverage full TII functionality.  I expect that admins could easily manage the first version but will not have access to TII settings on the second.

[cwhermsen]

Thanks  @jrboek ‌ for raising this.

We have this issue as well: our subaccount admins have to enrol themselves for any Turnitin question or issue where their help is needed, and the same applies to me as one of the central admins. The subaccount admins complain about this, and rightly so: it's annoying and time consuming. It's also frustrating for me, as I deal with many Turnitin issues as well. Additionally, when I enrol my own account, teachers can receive a notification about this and since they tend not to know me, this might cause unnecessary confusion or concern.

I do have to add that I think this could also be fixed by Canvas, instead of by Turnitin: having a "quick enrol as teacher" button for anyone with certain admin privileges would remove a lot of the hassle - especially if this is done without informing any teacher already present in the course.

[JACOBSEN_C]

Adding to a courses enrollment through the live API may be a quick-ish work around.

https://[...].instructure.com/doc/api/live

[lindalee]

Hi John Boekenoogen,

We've just received permission to speak publicly about this -- we've been piloting Turnitin's new integration with the Canvas Plagiarism Framework with live courses since January. As Jill Bond notes from the demo she received (and as I hinted at above), admins DO NOT need to enrolled in a site as a member of the teaching team to interact with the Turnitin-specific settings, to see the originality report results within Canvas, or to launch the originality reports from Canvas.

Overall, the new integration is a significant improvement -- much easier for admins to support. I'd encourage you to take a look at when it's released in a few months (May or June, I believe).

-Linda