Turnitin Wednesdays

You have probably heard of 'Orange Wednesdays'. Now, I'll admit that a lot of people might be more easily enticed to a free trip to the cinema than a free webinar, but iParadigms UK, apparently undaunted, have taken a leaf out of Orange's book and have introduced a series of webinars on Wednesdays. (Before Orange take legal advice, I should point out that they haven't actually called them 'Turnitin Wednesdays'!)

Every Wednesday at 2 pm (UK time) they are running Introduction to Turnitin webinars -  sign-up is via this link.

Then following these at 3 pm, there is a series of webinars looking at various aspects of plagiarism prevention, with a pedagogical rather than technical emphasis. Upcoming sessions include:

• 9 March: Getting the message across to students
• 16 March: How and why students plagiarise
• 23 March: Identifying and tackling plagiarism
• 30 March: Designing plagiarism out of coursework
• 6 April: Best practice for dealing with academic misconduct
• 13 April: Institutional policies and procedures

(Please note these sessions are for teaching and support staff only.)

To give an idea of what these sessions involve, here are my recollections following a previous 'institutional policies and procedures' session a few weeks ago. 

One of the interesting aspects was the diversity of current practice amongst institutions represented. The widespread and growing adoption of Turnitin as the coursework submission tool used within VLEs seems to be a big driver for HEIs to reconsider their approaches. It seems clear that simply 'switching on Turnitin to catch the offenders' isn't best practice - consideration of how to make use of Turnitin with students in a formative way is urgently needed.