Turnitin & Discussion Forums Plagiarism

Turnitin & Discussion Forums Plagiarism

by Phil T -
Number of replies: 2

Quick background: I'm working with an instructor who wants to prevent students from plagiarizing the discussion posts of their peers and so one option we're looking at is using Turnitin's tool for discussion forums https://help.turnitin.com/integrity/instructor/moodle/assignments/adding-turnitin-to-a-moodle-forum.htm 

Question: does the Turnitin discussion forum tool check only for plagiarized posts from forums in one specific class section, or does it search much more broadly (e.g., all Moodle courses offered by a particular college)? Thanks.

Moodle v. 3.8

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In reply to Phil T

Re: Turnitin & Discussion Forums Plagiarism

by Dan Marsden -
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It copies the text from the forum post (and any files attached to the post) and sends them to Turnitin to get a report. It doesn't work alll that well with small amounts of text and is really designed to work best when the student is required to use the forum for at least a paragraph of text - it doesn't do a comparison on other forum posts in Moodle (unless those forum posts have also been previously sent to Turnitin) - Urkund (another plagiarism tool that supports forum) - doesn't accept text lower than 450 Characters - and I think there's a similar limit imposed by the Turnitin plugin but I don't remember what that specific value is.
Average of ratings: Useful (2)
In reply to Dan Marsden

Re: Turnitin & Discussion Forums Plagiarism

by Phil Ti -
Thanks for the helpful information.
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