When your school drops turnitin in the first weeks of the semester

[downer]

One of my schools is in financial crisis it seems. (Though it hasn't appeard in the "schools in financial crisis" thread yet.)

One of the cost-cutting measures is to no longer support turnitin.com. This was announced recently.

For the school, I'm teaching one class on Blackboard and one on Canvas. Both online courses.

Blackboard has its own SafeAssign, which isn't great but is OK.

But Canvas as implemented at the school has no automatic internet-similiarity measurement system.

My immediate thought is that now students will be doing a lot of copying and pasting on their papers.

There are ways of course to track down plagiarism but they would require a lot more work on my part. And I don't get paid enough for that.

So I was thinking I should change the paper assignments or just get rid of them altogether for the Canvas course.

Or I could activate the Blackboard shell for the course on Canvas, and get the students to submit papers on BB. But that seems like a recipe for a lot of problems.

I'm guessing similar changes will be occurring at other schools.

What do you do if you don't have automatic plagiarism detection?

[polly_mer]

Read the papers and grade them accordingly.  Your job isn't being the plagiarism police.

If something jumps out as being unusual for an individual student, Google it and then document.

Eliminating the papers is a bad action if one of the goals for the course is writing or communication.

[Aster]

Wait, your institution is operating with *two* different LMS systems simultaneously???

Dear sweet mercy...

[downer]

Wait, your institution is operating with *two* different LMS systems simultaneously???

Dear sweet mercy...

It's a transitional year for the LMS. Though I suspect that they may just stick with whichever one is cheaper in the end.

[clean]

Or I could activate the Blackboard shell for the course on Canvas, and get the students to submit papers on BB. But that seems like a recipe for a lot of problems.

Id switch everything to Blackboard, not just the paper submissions.  You can download the spreadsheet from Canvas into excel.  Make whatever changes are necessary and then upload the grade center into blackboard.
Otherwise, the entire issue can be done in a weekend given that you are likely fluent with both systems.

Of course it depends on how much of a problem plagiarism is there, and how many assignments you have made that should be checked.   

[polly_mer]

Wait, your institution is operating with *two* different LMS systems simultaneously???

Dear sweet mercy...

It's a transitional year for the LMS. Though I suspect that they may just stick with whichever one is cheaper in the end.

Then, a switch to Moodle is in your future since that's open source and free upfront to install.  Having enough support to make Moodle run well ends up being as expensive as anything else, but it looks good up front.

[Hegemony]

I structure my paper assignments so that it would be very hard for students to find a source to copy. They might be able to copy one sentence at a time, but they'd have to do so much reading and choosing that it would be as much work as writing a paper themselves, and they'd learn as much as they were supposed to anyway.

So what I'd advise is assigning paper topics that can't be fulfilled by plagiarized papers.

[spork]

Do not use two LMSs for the same course. You will confuse students and more than double your workload.

You might be able to create a free "class" Turnitin account to which your students can upload, also for free, their writing assignments.

[Caracal]

I structure my paper assignments so that it would be very hard for students to find a source to copy. They might be able to copy one sentence at a time, but they'd have to do so much reading and choosing that it would be as much work as writing a paper themselves, and they'd learn as much as they were supposed to anyway.

So what I'd advise is assigning paper topics that can't be fulfilled by plagiarized papers.

I'm with Hegemony and Poly. We have Turnitin and I don't bother with it. I never found it all that useful in identifying plagiarism. When something looks suspicious to me, I just google it. When my students plagiarize, they almost always are doing it from some really obvious place. And, my writing assignments are based on particular sources, or in upper level courses, particular groups of sources. That makes it easier to see when something seems to be lifted, but it also means that if I do miss plagiarism, the paper is going to get a pretty bad grade anyway.

[AmLitHist]

+1 to Caracal.

[downer]

Wait, your institution is operating with *two* different LMS systems simultaneously???

Dear sweet mercy...

It's a transitional year for the LMS. Though I suspect that they may just stick with whichever one is cheaper in the end.

Then, a switch to Moodle is in your future since that's open source and free upfront to install.  Having enough support to make Moodle run well ends up being as expensive as anything else, but it looks good up front.

Well, it's not my decision to make and my impression has been that the IT dept is overwhelemed at it is. I'd be surprised if they go to a third LMS any time soon.

I structure my paper assignments so that it would be very hard for students to find a source to copy. They might be able to copy one sentence at a time, but they'd have to do so much reading and choosing that it would be as much work as writing a paper themselves, and they'd learn as much as they were supposed to anyway.

So what I'd advise is assigning paper topics that can't be fulfilled by plagiarized papers.

I'm with Hegemony and Poly. We have Turnitin and I don't bother with it. I never found it all that useful in identifying plagiarism. When something looks suspicious to me, I just google it. When my students plagiarize, they almost always are doing it from some really obvious place. And, my writing assignments are based on particular sources, or in upper level courses, particular groups of sources. That makes it easier to see when something seems to be lifted, but it also means that if I do miss plagiarism, the paper is going to get a pretty bad grade anyway.

Makes sense. I generally give distinctive paper topics that won't be so easy to get copy and paste solutions for anyway. Nevertheless, I did find Turnitin very useful as a time saver, and helpful as a plagiarism-deterrent.  Given my work load this semester, I don't plan to spend more time playing plagiarism detective, nor going through any official college plagiarism process if I find it.

[cathwen]

Downer, my university has done exactly the same thing—we are in transition between Canvas (the new LMS) and Blackboard (dropping after this fall).  According to a webinar I attended, it's because Canvas is a lot cheaper.  Like you, I have chosen take the plunge and use Canvas this fall. 

One thing we were told, rather forcefully, was not to have both Canvas and Blackboard "on" at the same time.

We are also dropping turnitin.  We received an email from one of the librarians suggesting alternatives, all of which had size limits that would make them impractical for most people.  I never used it much, anyway, due to the nature of my written assignments, but I think this will be a major headache for those who do.

[fishbrains]

I would tell students about the change and point out that your college is basically moving from a "let's check Turnitin before you submit the final version of your essay" kind of attitude to a "If I have to spend a f*cking hour or two with Google searches and institutional documentation for your plagiarism, I will fail you and crush your will to live" kind of attitude. They could probably use the heads-up.

And you might want to phrase that a little differently.

[the_geneticist]

I use TurnitIn to check for plagiarism.  I can catch obvious cases myself, but my TAs aren't as savvy.  It is also a way to make sure that two students don't turn in identical or nearly identical assignments in our huge classes.  It's tempting and rather easy to write one paper if you know that different folks are going to grade your essay and your friend's essay.
Other folks like it for checking that students have bothered to make substantial edits to a previous version.