At HRC, we have been slowly introducing Turnitin to enable staff to check for Plagiarism in student work, and to give students an insight into how they can improve the quality of their written work.
We, the E-Learning team have been working with lecturers who are currently testing TurnItIn on their Moodle courses. One of the lecturers we have been working with is Keith Howlett in Public Services.
Keith wanted to use TurnItIn with his second year students for them to submit one of their assessments. We met up with Keith and discussed what the requirements were for the Turnitin assessment to work for him. What was decided was that we would set up a TurnItIn activity with two parts and a time limit of 2 weeks for the students to submit their work. In the setting up process, we showed Keith how to use TurnItIn and how the student experience would be.
After the two week submission period, we caught up with Keith to find out how it went with his students using Turnitin. One of the first things he said to us was “I like it, I think it’s great, but my student don’t!”. When asked why the students didn’t like it, Keith explained that it had been a shock to the system for the learners to see how much work is plagiarised. It could have also been to do with the learners being used to the existing submission system on Moodle (them being second year students).
We asked Keith if he would use it again he said: “I’m going to use it from the start of the year in September as part of the standard submission process and so that new students will automatically start to use it. If you’re interested in joining the TurnItIn pilot, please contact elearning@hrc.ac.uk
HRC e-Learning Blog 