Grammarly in Canvas

[cmccann1]

Grammarly is a plagiarism detection and writing-enhancement tool, has anyone tried it?

Grammarly with Canvas LMS - YouTube 

[chofer]

Hello there,  @cmccann1 ...

While I have never used Grammarly myself, I wanted to share these links with you that I've found here in the Canvas Community.  In each of these discussions, there's at least one mention of Grammarly that you might want to look at:

Alternative to Turnitin? 

Is there a free app for a plagiarism checker? 

https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/1508 

https://community.canvaslms.com/ideas/8596 

Also, your question doesn't sound like it may have one "Correct" answer, so I am going to convert your Question (where a response can be marked as "Correct") to a Discussion.  I hope this is alright with you.

[laurakgibbs]

People should be aware of the extremely poor quality of Grammarly's grammar correction (so-called), which is true also for all of these automated grammar checkers. The people who are able to benefit most from such systems are the ones who can be sensitive to the numerous false-positives and false-negatives that such systems produce, especially the false-positives (telling someone there is a grammar problem when there is no problem at all). That means these products are the least helpful to the students who most need help.

For helping students with work on writing mechanics, see this helpful post from Jennifer Gonzales:

How to Deal with Student Grammar Errors

https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/grammar-spelling-errors/ 

About Grammarly's plagiarism-detection, I have no experience with that because I do not believe in using automated plagiarism detectors (more on that).

I test the grammar checkers always hoping that I will find one good enough to recommend to my students; so far I have not found one even worth recommending, although ATD is the least bad based on my testing (fewest false-positives), for whatever that's worth, so it is the one I recommend to my students, but that's only to use as a spellchecker which they can access on any computer (without grammar checking that is going to do more harm than good):

Online Course Wiki / Word Count and Spellcheck

[Stef_retired]

 @cmccann1 , I'd like to echo what laurakgibbs‌ has said. Many of the students in my higher level writing intensive classes struggled with basic writing skills—yet they viewed Grammarly and other mechanical grammar correcting programs as some sort of panacea. I urged them to ignore Grammarly, and instead to take their work to our Writing Center or avail themselves of the services of Certified Partner - tutor.com (which allows students to work one-on-one in synchronous sessions with live tutors or submit their work for asynchronous grammar feedback).

[dwillmore]

I ain't no good writter.     I am using Grammarly, a Russian product, now and the only thing it caught in that first sentence is writter.   Automated anything has its limitations.   While the AI dream and nightmare is a future reality, it is not here now.   Simply ask Siri a number of questions to see this reality.   I still use Grammarly to catch my use of passive verbs and I like their spell checker.

Plagiarism

We reviewed Grammarly's anti-plagiarism capabilities and found that the tool is targeted at the student to use prior to handing in a paper and not for the teacher to use.   The teacher was able to upload student papers, but this was not a process like you have with Turnitin.

There is nothing scarier in my job than writing an email to English professors as an IT geek.

[laurakgibbs]

FWIW the English professors are just as scared of HTML. 🙂

[thecapnvideo]

Yeah, well, the eggheads put ain't into the dictionary not so long ago so Grammarly would allow "ain't no."

[dwahl_sales]

Grammarly doesn't do a great job of explaining that different components of their tool are only available in different areas.  There are three main ways to use grammarly:

• Browser Plugin
• Grammarly Website/Desktop App
• MS Office (Windows) plugin

The browser plugin, which is the only one that "works" with Canvas, has the least amount of features.  It does not perform style checking, plagiarism detection, vocabulary enhancement, or allow proofreading.  It is simply a spell check and grammar check tool.  That said, the spelling and grammar check do work.

Also, I haven't tested it with Canvas since around August, so features may have changed.

[ericwerth]

Just wondering laurakgibbs, stefaniesanders,  @dwillmore ,  @dwahl_sales  and anyone else if you have used the premium version of Grammarly as opposed to the free version.  Automated checkers of any kind can only do so much but it looks as though the premium version claims to catch twice as many errors as the free version.  Curious if anyone has experience with the paid version.

Thanks!

[laurakgibbs]

Not really of interest because I would never urge my students to pay for such a service, but if somebody has a paid account and wants a copy of one of the proofreading assessments I used to use with my students, I would be glad to share the piece of writing and then compare the results to what I usually see with students.

Here's an example of that comparison against WriteCheck (aka WriteMeACheck), TurnItIn's service to rip off students with hyped promises of writing "help"

Testing WriteCheck