Turnitin LTI App in Canvas: Teacher & Student Onboarding

clong
Community Champion
9
2023

It feels like preparing your Tax return! No one looks forward to doing it, but it sure is nice to have it done – especially if you get a refund. So it is with switching over from the legacy Turnitin API integration (to be deprecated by the end of 2016) to the new Turnitin LTI integration. As a Canvas Admin, configuring the switch over is actually pretty easy and takes just a few minutes. The real challenge is  explaining how this change will affect the workflow of your teachers and students.

First off, I have to let you know about the Canvas and Turnitin​ blog post  @dhulsey ​ has crafted! It has nearly everything, anyone would need to know about making the switch over and he does an amazing job keeping that up to date while responding to a variety of questions and what if scenarios! I wanted to add to the effort by making a simple getting started guide and video that highlights the basics and shows both the teacher and student perspectives. So , I read Dallas' blog post at least three times and tested out a variety of scenarios, just to be sure I understood the nuances of how the new LTI integration works. Once I was comfortable with this, I took a bunch of screenshots with Snagit​ and pasted them into a shared Google Presentation then added some annotations to each slide. I call this a slide guide. It give you a quick visual of what you need to know, but then I expanded on it by making a screencast of me going through the slides and elaborating on them. For that I make sure my Google slides are displayed so they are 1280 x 720 pixels. I do this by dragging the browser window so that the slides are the same size as this 720p graphic I made. Then I use ScreenFlow to record the screencast and upload it to YouTube. Below are the finished products I just sent out to our teachers. Please feel free to share them and/or make a copy of the slides to use with your staff.

If these are helpful to you, I'd love to hear your feedback and I'd really appreciate it if you would take a moment to look at ​ and if you like it, please VOTE it UP Smiley Wink

9 Comments
dhulsey
Community Champion

Thanks for the kind words, Chris! These are great resources.

ddamschen
Community Participant

Thanks Chris! This is very helpful as we are working towards figuring out a common workflow for our teachers. I do have a question for you in regards to the TII settings. When I create an assignment (50 pts with a 9/19/16 due date), the only assignment information that carries over to the TurnItIn settings is Title and Due Date. Point value did not.

Screen Shot 2016-09-16 at 10.45.18 AM.png

Do you know why this would happen? In your examples, the Max Grade field is greyed out. Is this an institutional setting? The less teachers need to "play" with the TTI settings, the better. Also- my start date does not reflect the day/time I created the assignment (9/16 @ 10:30am).

Thoughts?

 @dhulsey ​- any idea? Smiley Happy

Thank you!

dhulsey
Community Champion

Hi, Dianne! If you have dates syncing but not points, this suggests that the custom code for date sync has been set up in the LTI tool, but the custom code for point syncing has not been set up or got pasted incorrectly or something. If you are the Canvas admin at your school, you can go into your LTI configuration in Canvas and check it. If not, ask your admin to take a look at the code in the custom fields of the Turnitin LTI tool.

203977_pastedImage_0.png

The above image shows all of the available custom codes in the LTI tool configuration.

The first line syncs the due date from Canvas

The second line communicates the canvas assignment ID

The third line syncs the assignment title from Canvas

The fourth line is the code to sync the points from Canvas

The fifth line syncs the start date from Canvas

ddamschen
Community Participant

Thanks Dallas!

I just checked our settings and here is what we currently have;

Screen Shot 2016-09-16 at 11.17.17 AM.png

The third line should be syncing the points. But, as you can tell from my first post, it was not. The same with the Start Date not synching from Canvas.

Note that we do not have the code to synch the assignment title from Canvas, yet this field IS synching and is greyed out. Weird.

dhulsey
Community Champion

That is odd. I just did a test and set up a new assignment. Mine is syncing the points (I used 10), and yeah, greyed out indicates syncing that can't be changed by hand.

204026_pastedImage_0.png

It looks like the next step is to file bug reports with Canvas and Turnitin.

ddamschen
Community Participant

Will do! Thanks for the help  @dhulsey 

ddamschen
Community Participant

 @dhulsey ​Heard back from custom support and it was a spelling error! :smileyangry:. Whoever set up the custom field misspelled "assignment" (forgot the 'n') and therefore the code did not work. Ugh. Thanks for your help though.

Another question: Is is possible to have the Feedback Release date match the Start Date time? And not have that field locked? We are trying to minimize the number of changes a teacher needs to make to the TII settings. Based on current behavior, not all our teachers seem to see a use for the Feedback dates. So we rather have the dates match the start date for the assignment. For those teachers who are more advanced with TII, can then have the ability to change that Feedback date it they want.

dhulsey
Community Champion

I am glad you found the error, Dianne. Now that you have the due date syncing working, the feedback release will default to the due date, but it is editable even with the syncing, so it can be set for later or earlier.

Ideally. whomever wrote the current custom codes would develop a library of codes to customize the behavior of the tool so that you could do things like set the feedback release date to the start date.

Sadly, I am not a coder, so I can't try it out myself.

galyenk
Community Contributor

This is AMAZINGLY helpful and will save me so much time as we are finishing up the conversion to LTI. THANK YOU!