Hi Moodlers, we are about to begin using Turnitin and are keen to use Dan Marsden’s Plagiarism Prevention Turnitin plugin. However, before we can launch, management have asked if there are any risks associated with using a plugin that Turnitin does not support and will be deprecated.
I would be very grateful for any advice!
Thanks,
Leonard Houx
you've already identified the 2 main risks in your post.
* Turnitin don't support the plugin directly - I try to via the forums but if you're looking for full support you'd need to pay me for my time
* The plugin is planned for deprecation with a new plugin that Turnitin are developing themselves to replace my plugin.
The only other thing I could possibly add is that my plugin was not originally designed to work with the other Turnitin products like grademark/writecycle etc - so you might find various things you don't like - such as the fact that the dates in Moodle for start/end of an assignment won't always match the start/end date listed within Turnitin for that same assignment - that isn't usually a problem unless you let your students/teachers interact directly with the turnitin site to use their other tools like grademark etc.
hope that helps.
From the man himself! Thanks for your response. I have one more question before we can go forth: can you comment on any security risks?
We are particularly worried about data leaks as we have heard of other institutions having data protection issues with some 3rd parties (not Turnitin) that will go unnamed.
the communication between Moodle and the Turnitin api is between your webserver and the turnitin server via https - Any content submitted to their US servers gets covered by the Patriot act which may/may not be an issue for your institution. I vaguely recall something about Turnitin operating a UK hosted api that isn't covered by the Patriot act but you'd need to clarify that with them as most content stored in their system gets re-used for comparison against other students submissions.
If the patriot act is a problem - I'd reccomend looking at URKUND or Compilatio as both originate from European countries and aren't covered by the Patriot act afaik.
hope that's useful.
Hi Dan ,
I have a question , is there any relation between moodle assignment due date and turnitin assignment due date ?
by default turnitin will set 1 year and many teachers don't realize it. So if they set "on due date" as parameter of time to generate reports , they have to wait 1 year for that .
thanks
Teddy
