[External Tools] Enable Turnitin for Discussion Posts

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.

100 Comments
mary_akatiff-cu
Community Novice

Please make it possible to use Turnitin for Discussion Boards. It will be helpful for so many instructors. I see Discussion Board cheating as a major problem as we migrate online.

dbarman
Community Novice

I have a work around I use in my class

I have created two separate assignments. One, is using turn it in. Students are required to post initially to turn it in assignments. Then, they post on the discussion board. I do get the originality report for each entry

Hope this helps

Professor David Barman

College of Business - School of Accounting

Florida International University

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phippsj
Community Novice

While I appreciate the work around, I would hope that Canvas would help us not to have to do a work around.  We already have so much work to do.  Canvas needs to step it up on this, it has been too long that they have been "working" on this.

angela_holland
Community Explorer

Came here to say this as well. We can all certainly come up with workarounds of all kinds. But this is something that Canvas should be able to implement, not something we should have to keep finding ways to build new systems and steps to function around it.

In a living discussion, these workarounds aren't functional nor useful. Students cut and paste information from the internet as their own version of a workaround versus doing their own work, more than we want to acknowledge.

That's why we need TurnItIn functionality within the discussions.

gemma_sinclair
Community Participant

We have been asked about this and to meet the need have developed a tool to extract discussion posts and submit to Turnitin.com but this is not ideal. Would like to see some options around using Turnitin with Graded Discussions.

sharon_kitching
Community Contributor

Echoing Gemma here  - the idea is not to create  more administrational work for academics by putting the responsibility on them or the students to double-submit, but to make it  a one-stop workflow. 

annamarie_piers
Community Novice

Might I add that it is even more critical

now to have this functionality when we are all “remote-teaching.” There’s so much additional time and screen time on the part of educators (often w/no comparable uptick in pay). To down load, compile, cut n paste, etc. - just to submit to “Turn It In” actually “turns” my stomach just at the thought of it. Why is this taking so long?

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jenksju
Community Member

This would be nice. I am not seeing how to vote for it, but it's been awhile since I've been in this arena.

GK4
Community Novice

What is the status of this idea? This feature would significantly assist instructors.

lauren_nuckols
Community Member

Plagiarism is common on discussion boards, and there has been a huge uptick during this pandemic. The workarounds take an incredible amount of time.  Are there any plans to move this idea to the next stage?   It would really help.   Thank you.