[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.

[Jeff_F]

And many people try to pay as little as possible for air travel, yet relish opportunities to complain about the experience. </trimmed for brevity>

[jhester]

It has been over a year since this much needed suggestion was made.  It would be nice to get an update on where we are regarding the integration of this into the discussion board feature.  The discussion board is the lifeline for many of our classes, but the inability to effectively and efficiently check for plagiarism on behalf of our students is incredibly frustrating when the capability exists in other areas of the course (assignments).

[tiffany_maglasa]

Agreed. Sometimes I have to result to googling certain phrases of their answers to see if they found it online. It is very inefficient... 

[hottingert]

I third this motion!  Any updates?

[Jeff_F]

 @jhester ‌   - I just checked and the Turnitin.com site has a similar idea submissions and voting system.  There is currently just a single vote for this idea.

Not sure if this link below will work for you.  I had to login to turnitin.com to access the suggestions forum.

https://turnitin.uservoice.com/forums/219534-welcome-to-turnitin-s-feedback-forum/suggestions/194556... 

[jhester]

Thank you Jeff, but I see this as something Canvas needs to address with the vendor.  I think most instructors would think to go to the LMS.

[janoble]

This would be VERY helpful!  I have students who are cutting and pasting comments from others in the same discussions, changing one or two words and making it their own discussion post!  

[dhulsey]

 @janoble ‌, there are some things you can do to discourage students from  shenanigans like that. Take a look: Stopping Intra-Class Academic Dishonesty via Discussions‌. Also, I find that having students annotate readings results in almost no plagiarism: Canvas and Perusall‌. I hope that helps!

[chriscas]

We have a few faculty here who would really appreciate this option (though it will hopefully be more broad than just Turnitin, and instead just utilize the new plagiarism framework).  I know there are probably some caveats with this functionality, but this functionality is really critical for certain discussions and/or course designs.  There are some workarounds (copy/paste entire discussion, then save as a document and do a one-time submission for plagiairsm check), but these are nowhere near ideal, and also don't really properly save the post information (which student posted what text) in the plagiarism databases.

[angela_holland]

As I'm grading a set of final discussions for one of my summer courses, I sit here with increasing frustration at the amount of utterly obvious copy and pasted content; and, I struggle with the epic amount of time it will (does) take, in order to properly find, document, and deal with these students and their plagiarism.

I say this in solidarity with the frustrations everyone else here has posted, and with only one question:

When, oh when, will this feature (or something like it) be available?

Lacking the ability to utilize "resources" that exist, but are only partially available - papers get TIN, discussions get nada - this really discourages the assignment and use of not only discussions, but also essay and short answers in exams and quizzes.

Noting that the posts on this particular Canvas chat have been up and going for more than two years, what is being done? No, really, come on already. Bah!