[External Tools] Enable Turnitin for Discussion Posts

[tlake2]

Greetings:

Thank you for your time in reviewing this idea.

It would be wonderful if Turnitin were enabled for Discussions posts and responses.

This would prevent students from cobbling together information from online sources to write original discussion posts.  It would be optimal if the Turnitin feature worked like the one provided for assignment submissions, so that students and faculty can see the percentage of match, etc.  This would be another great tool for helping students understand the importance of originality and avoiding plagiarism.

Thank you very much for your consideration.

[raye]

Yes! This would be an enormous help! It also seems like a common sense option for online courses!

[sandra_moore]

I hope that incorporating turnitin for Canvas discussions is implemented!!  It would save my time checking for plagiarism. Thank you for proposing it.

[angela_holland]

Wondering if ANYONE AT CANVAS is taking these concerns seriously? This post has only been up for 3 years now.

Seriously, this shouldn't even be a discussion point anymore, it should be implemented. Plagiarism in discussions is just as much of an issue, if not more so than in "papers" (particularly because students know, it's so hard to check). 

Please implement TurnItIn within discussions. Come on already! 

[tbarreto]

This is so important and needs to be implemented. 

[cholling]

I search "discussions turnitin" and stumbled on this discussion.  I've lost track of the number of my faculty who have issues with plagiarism in discussion posts this academic year alone. This would be such a useful feature - especially if it were one the faculty could choose to enable through an option in the way it can be enabled for assignment uploads now. I have instructed them to use one of the work-arounds such as copy/paste/submit through an assignment themselves, but that is very tedious. 

The biggest downside that I see for enabling this functionality in discussions is that for assignments, students can review their report (including grammar, which is sorely needed in many cases) and resubmit assignments after editing. That would be a little more clunky with discussions because others might have already replied. Still, I think the benefit to instructors outweighs this downside. 

I really hope the community will step up to this one and continue to vote it up so that it gains traction next quarter.

[Jeff_F]

I spoke with the Turnitin reps at Instructurecon about this and was told this feature suggestion is not on the near term radar.

So I then contemplated how Instructure might help facilitate a workaround.  For example, the ability to press a button to export the discussion board content to a pdf.  Then instructors could direct submit the pdf to Turnitin.  Of course this would bypass the check box students see when posting, but so long as the syllabus states the instructor may use various means to check for authenticity that may not be an issue.   Without the above button it is necessary to perform a sometimes kluge copy/ paste from the discussion replies list, as noted previously in this discussion.

[dhulsey]

 @Jeff_F ‌. there is a feature request to export discussions: https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/1506-export-discussions?sr=search&searchId=71d73990-4a9b-4c31-...‌. I agree this would be a good stopgap. 

[fernando_ferrer]

Hi,

We need a tool to help the community in developing a way of posting content free from plagiarism.

There is nothing wrong is using published information, all the contrary, research is a demand but it is wrong not to give the credit to the authors.

Thank you!

Professor Fernando Ferrer

[dbarman]

Three years later and we still cannot do this?

[dominiquel]

I would love to see the same with URKUND API