Free online Turnitin training

nlearning, the Northumbria University spin-out company who support Turnitin in the UK, are now offering weekly training webinars for TurnitinUK users (for instructors, rather than admins).

They sent an email advising:

Sessions are every Wednesday at 1400 (GMT) via WebEx and dial in details will be sent to you after you sign up. There is no limit to the number of sessions you attend or the number of people who can attend. Please feel free to forward this mail on to any colleagues who you feel may be interested in this training.

Please sign up using this form: http://spreadsheets.google.com/embeddedform?formkey=dDdDTkstUDBrZUswYU5kUzV0cE95MGc6MA

I attended the first session in order to get an idea of how useful it might be for our user base in Bloomsbury (bearing in mind we are using Turnitin via the Blackboard integration).

Although they were using webex, it was possible to get audible/understandable sound via the headset and not be dialled in on the phone, so that was definitely a point in its favour.

It would be quite a useful session for someone using the standalone (submit.ac.uk) version of Turnitin rather than through the Blackboard integration as we use it. The part that could cause some confusion for our instructors was the explanation of creating a class, getting students to sign up or uploading your student list, all of which in our case is handled by the building block.

Then there was quite a good discussion of the originality reporting aspect.

There was plenty of time for Q & A built in at the end.

Overall as I suspected, I think we would be better off getting people to attend an integration-specific session, but I don't know yet if nlearning are definitely going to provide this, and how regularly.