Adding Turnitin to a Blackboard Assignment

Turnitin can now be used to augment the Blackboard Assignment with Originality Report. This provides an alternative to using the Turnitin Assignment when similarity checking is required and allows you to combine the Blackboard Assignment features with TurnItIn Similarity report in one tool.

Instructions

Supported filetypes

If you are enabling Turnitin, the student files need to be in a format that is recognised by Turnitin processing.

Make sure the file contains more than 20 words, is less than 100 MB and is in a recognisable text-based file such as MS Word documents (.doc, .docx), MS Powerpoint (.pptX), plain text (.txt), PDF (.pdf), OpenOffice (ODT), Rich Text Format (.rtf).

Adding TurnItIn as the Originality Report provider

The TurnitIn originality report functionality is ‘OFF’ by default. After creating a Blackboard Assignment, if you wish to turn it ‘ON’, click Enable Turnitin under Originality Report.

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This will open up Assignment settings.

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Move the green slider switch to enable turnitin. This will then change to ‘Turnitin Enabled’, indicating that the Originality report functionality has been switched on.

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The following settings are available under ‘Compare submissions against’. These options allow you to select the repositories that students' submissions will be checked against when processing Similarity Reports.

• Student database

  • This option compares current submissions to previous submissions in classes and assignments in Turnitin across institutions.

• Institutional database

  • This option compares current submissions to the repository of student papers unique to Ulster University

• Website content 

  • This option compares current submissions to a repository of archived and live publicly available internet pages containing billions of pages of existing content and tens of thousands of new pages added daily.

• Periodicals, journals, and publications

  • This option compares current submissions to third party periodical, journal, and publication content including many major professional journals, periodicals, and business publications.

We recommend the following settings for a dropbox with multiple attempts:

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NB Not all the standard Turnitin functionality is available within Blackboard

Checking TurnItIn reports

Once students have submitted their work, the Originality Reports are processed and made available through the marking screen:

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Blackboard Assignment Marking screen

Click on the Originality score to open the report:

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Originality report

Sources can be inspected and excluded. Click on Sources in the right-hand-side panel:

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Further filtering options are available through the Filters menu:

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