Turnitin administration

Turnitin administration

Location: Administration > Modules > Activities > Turnitin

Overview

Turnitin is a commercial paper submission system, you must have a paid subscription to this service to use this feature. This integration is part of Moodle 2.0, and there is a 3rd party patch available for Moodle 1.9 users.

The patch for 1.9 is available in this forum thread:

http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=98199

Look for "TII_Integration_Patch_Beta_2.zip" as an attachment to one of the posts from Dan Marsden.

Direct link to the patches:

• TII_Integration_Patch.zip released 29-MAY-2008 (my birthday :) (NOTE: This is the first patch and should not be used. It is listed here for historical reasons only)
• TII_Integration_Patch_Beta_2.zip released 14-JUL-2008 (Bastille day!)

Activation of your Turnitin Account

1. obtain a Turnitin Subscription from www.turnitin.com
2. obtain an API Integration secret key from Turnitin Rep. - once you have a Turnitin Subscription, to obtain this you will need to send an e-mail to your Turnitin Account Rep - obtaining this secret key is free.

Global Configuration of Turnitin

1. Ensure Admin > Server > Environment indicates you have curl installed
2. in the page Admin > Modules > Activities > Turnitin set the following:
   1. Tick the box "Use Turnitin Submission"
   2. Enter your Turnitin Account ID
   3. Enter your Turnitin Secret Key as obtained from your Turnitin Account Rep
   4. Elect whether to send students an e-mail to allow them to login to the turnitin.com site to view their submissions (this isn't necessary, and will likely cause your students more confusion, as all the information available in the website is available from your moodle site.) - even if no e-mail is sent, students can visit turnitin.com and use the forgotten password functionality on the turnitin site to get their password sent via e-mail. Admins can disable this by adding a prefix to all email accounts created - see below for details.
   5. Add an e-mail prefix if you don't want students to be able to access the reports on turnitin.com - it is advised that you allow the integration in moodle to control what your students see, however, if you allow them to login to turnitin.com they can bypass the settings made regarding when a report should be available. - it's also possible that they could potentially upload a file to turnitin.com instead of moodle, which you may not notice. It's reccommended that you put something in this box to make the e-mail addresses for students stored on the turnitin.com system invalid.
   6. Set a Course Prefix - this is not compulsory, however if you have more than 1 Moodle site connecting to the Turnitin API - eg a testing site, and a production site, then a prefix MUST be set, because Turnitin will only allow 1 course with the same name - and only 1 assignment within that course with the same name. - you will potentially get conflicts if this is not set.
   7. Set a username, email-address, firstname and surname of a user that does not already exist in your Turnitin account. Turnitin only allows 1 teacher to be assigned to a course, so the integration needs to use a "global teacher" usercode that becomes the default Teacher (Turnitin refer to teachers as "instructors") to all assignments created in your moodle install.
   8. Set the Student Disclosure statement. - this is displayed to all students on the upload screen to notify them that the Turnitin system is in use.

Configuration of Turnitin inside Moodle Activity Modules

Assignment Module

(currently only available with the advanced file upload and single upload types)

• Create a new Assignment within your course.
• Enable Turnitin Submission

Debugging

• when testing the turnitin integration you should make sure debugging is turned on, as it will provide information regarding the process.
• error codes recieved from the turnitin API are also logged in the mdl_tii_files table, so you can view issues with a production system.
• each file that is going to be submitted to turnitin is added to the table mdl_tii_files - the field tiicode gives the "status" of the file, - there are 3 "good" states for this field:

1. "pending" - this is a new file that has been uploaded to an activity module, and needs to be submitted to Turnitin (will happen next time cron runs)
2. "51" - this is the turnitin API code for Successful upload - this means the file has been uploaded to Turnitin and we are waiting on an originality score,
3. "success" - this is a file that has been submitted, and a score has been provided for it.

Any other response code in this field indicates an error state. - There is a Turnitin API document in the forums somewhere that I uploaded that details these error codes, and their meaning, I will add them to this wiki page at some point to help with debugging.