Introduction

All Lecturers in WIT can create a Turnitin Assignment type in any module within Moodle once they have editing rights, students do not have editing rights to create Turnitin activities or any other type of activity or resource in Moodle, see more here on Moodle roles.

Moodle has many different types of assessments, such as quizzes, assignments, forums, and workshops. Each offers different styles of assessment for the students. Lecturers may wish to encourage learners to self assess or may prefer more traditional quiz type assessments as part of formative assessment or use assignment types such as Turnitin.

What is Turnitin and why would you use it

We would recommend that you view this post before you proceed and create a Turnitin assignment activity, there are some considerations that you might want to know and it might be a case that an ordinary Moodle assignment type will suffice, the bottom line is that if a Lecturer has some doubts over the originality of the students work, we would also encourage the use of Turnitin as a technology tool that helps students to improve their academic writing skills, Turnitin and more specifically the similarity report will help students with referencing, summarizing, paraphrasing.

How to create a Turnitin assignment

1. To create an activity in Moodle you will need editing-lecturer access to the module, once in the Module, you will need to the following;
2. Turn 'editing turned on'.
3. Now you should decide which section you want the Turnitin assignment to be located.
4. In that section choose 'Show' then choose 'add and activity or resource' if you scroll down this list you will see 'Turnitin' add that.
5. Now you should see the options to give the Turnitin activity a name, you can use whatever name you and the students normally use.
6. By default, Turnin provides one 'Part' you could change this to two parts (let's say if you wanted separate submissions for two journal articles up for review)
7. You can also give set the opening date/time and the due date/time (post date is the date the feedback and grade become available to the student), this allows different dates for different parts if you using more then the default Part 1.
8. In the Originality Report Options, you must decide the report generation speed, this defaults to Immediately (and student can resubmit until the due date/time) and will have 3 attempts before they have to wait 24 hours for the Similarity report back, you can change this so that the student will not receive a similarity report until after the due date, which at that time the student will not be able to resubmit.  
9. Also in the Originality Report Options, you must decide if you want to store the student's paper in the Turnitin database or not.
10. There are some options around restrictions and groups if you are using them, please see here for practical information on setting up restrictions and see here for practical steps on setting up groups inside your module.  
11. See the practical steps below when creating a Turnitin Assignment Activity.

Important Settings you should know about

• Each student is presented with a Plagiarism declaration before they make the very first submission, they have to check a declaration statement before they continue, you can view that statement here and just to note that this declaration statement is used across all disciplines in WIT.
• The similarity report generation speed defaults to three free attempts and students can resubmit up to the due date. You can change this so that the student will not receive a similarity report until after the due date, which at that time the student will not be able to resubmit. 
• Turnitin only detects similarities over text and will not include video or audio as part of the plagiarism detection algorithm.
• You can choose to either store the student's paper in the Turnitin Repository or you can prevent that (No repository, either way, the students will still get a similarity report, and you as the Lecturer will still be able to see the student uploaded submission along with the similarity report.
• You can decide to exclude or include the bibliography the default is to include the bibliography.

File types and file size

If you use a Turnitin assignment type in Moodle then that activity has a 100MB limit (normal Moodle assignments have a 2GB limit), this is important if files contain media such as video, audio, large photos, if the file is over 100MB then the student will not be allowed upload until the file size is under 100MB.

Turnitin allows most file types such as Microsoft Word (DOC and DOCX), HTML, Plain text (TXT), Rich Text Format (RTF), Portable Document Format (PDF), OpenOffice (ODT), Powerpoint (PPT and PPTX) and Google Docs via Google Drive.

Note: please do not ask students to use Vector Images in their submission, Vector images are sometimes used in PowerPoint templates and cause problems when students try to view the similarity report. Also please ensure that Students combine text with scanned images, so if you are asking your student to scan their work and upload the scanned image to Turnitin make sure you ask your student to include more than 20 words with their scanned documents

Steps

Step 1 - Turn editing on

Step 2 - Located te section and add the activity

Step 3 - add the Turnitin Activity

Step 4 - give the activity a name and leave some instructions for the students in the description

Step 5 - By default, Turnin provides one 'Part' you could change this to two parts (let's say if you wanted separate submissions for two journal articles up for review)

Note: Please be aware that the upload limit for Turnitin Assignments is 100MB

Step 6 - You can also give set the opening date/time and the due date/time (post date is the date the feedback and grade become available to the student), this allows different dates for different parts if you using more then the default Part 1.

Note: the Post date is the date the feedback/grades (if in place) become available to the student

Step 7 - Decide on the Originality Options, here you must decide the report generation speed, this defaults to Immediately, you must also decide if you want Turnitin to store the student's paper in the Turnitin database or not.

Also, decide on the repository setting.

Note: There are some options around restrictions and groups if you are using them, please see point 10 above.