1. Service Updates
Communication
Status updates:
various options to be updated on this including email, Twitter, RSS. You can
also enable mobile notification from the Twitter feed. They send updates on the
US and UK services via the same Twitter account (TurnitinStatus) which many felt was unhelpful
so perhaps this will be changed.
Support
Portal
They
have never had one but will now be implementing this – it will enable us to see
all open cases and any progress they are making. This would enable us to
have a Bloomsbury-wide overview of the service status as well as better visibility at the more granular level of individual support tickets.
Currently
their plan is that there will be an additional charge as this has never been
included in our licence cost. At the moment they are seeing this as something
some clients will opt in to and pay for but I wonder if it wouldn’t be better
to provide this for all customers as the cost would then be spread widely. Possibly HELF (the Heads of e-Learning Forum) could make this suggestion on behalf of
UK HE if there is general agreement across the sector.
There
is an opportunity to join the pilot of the system which seems like a good idea for Bloomsbury.
Relaunched
and improved with a lot of resources worth checking out – the conference
proceedings from the last 10 years are now up.
2. Product Roadmap -
General
Grademark
We were reminded to promote the online tutorial for Grademark. There are free/public rubrics available
now (from the US) which we can download and adapt.
iPad
App
This is due in beta
in late February, with full launch in May – this allows you to sync the papers and
mark offline, which is a very useful feature that is possible to implement for
iPad but unfortunately not for Android (or for use on Windows / Mac laptops
either) at this time. Android may become a possibility (or at least
certain devices).
One point that concerned me was that it may not be totally
straightforward for staff who use Turnitin integrated with Moodle (as ours exclusively do) unfortunately
as they will need to find a one time access code in the Document Viewer to get
them in to the relevant class via the iPad app.
Admin
account interface (via the submit.ac.uk website)
There
will be improvements to the interface and tools available to us.
Document
viewer
This
is the main interface Turnitin users ever see, which contains the Originality
Report and Grademark views of the submissions. Version 2 is now in progress for
release by the end of this year and should solve some of the persistent issues
(but will be even less compatible with older browsers than the current one).
3. Product Roadmap -
Integrations
Legacy
API
(i.e.
the current API all integrations are connecting to.) There are a lot of issues
with the legacy API and a new one is under construction. This will resolve the
prevalent 423 errors and will support use of Peermark by integration users.
Moodle
Direct Integration
This is what we use in Bloomsbury. The new
version of MD will connect via the new SOAP API. This will provide support for using
Turnitin in the same way as users of the current ‘Dan Marsden’ plugin, which
lets you use the normal Moodle assignment tool but still run an originality
report. This may suit staff/departments which want the OR but don’t want to mark
online.
It
will be possible to download anonymous assignments (at the moment this function
is switched off when anonymity is enabled, because Turnitin appends the
student’s name when you download, so a code change will allow for downloading
with names removed). The beta version of Moodle Direct v 2 is expected in May.
4. Guest Speaker
Cheryl Reynolds
(University of Huddersfield) - The JISC EBEAM Project
Cheryl presented an interesting case study of the implementation of Turnitin at Huddersfield under the auspices of EBEAM,
which sought to drive uptake of online submission and marking.
The emphasis was put
on the benefits to staff. Lessons included: compulsion
caused hostility. People will make the move in their own time, especially once
colleagues are doing it.
Some
tutors started using the new audio feedback option which students are responding
very positively to – students in general felt the audio feedback was more
personal and ‘human’ but it was also especially useful because of the greater
accessibility of audio compared with text for visually impaired and dyslexic
students.
