[Using Sakai] VeriCite vs. Turnitin comparions matrix

[CEATH mail]

Thanks for the many requests to provide the LAMP Consortium's little side-by-side comparison of Turnitin and VeriCite in the Sakai environment.  Please see the attached.

VeriCite does not pretend to be everything that Turnitin is, and its price reflects that.  That said, it does what we need it to do: help us identify potential plagiarism in a way that integrates beautifully with Sakai.

A few caveats:

1.  The LAMP Consortium operates on a cost sharing basis.  We take the costs of running the consortium, hosting of Sakai, support, faculty development summer conferences, and third party products like Turntin, and divide them among our members in a transparent an equitable way.  Thus we are particularly price sensitive.  The ever-increasing costs of Turnitin were what drove us to seek an alternative.  The shaky quality of the interface between Turnitn and Sakai added to our concerns.

2.  I personally have a philosophy that functionality should not be duplicated.  Thus, even though Turnitin has a gradebook, Sakai has one too that is already used in many other ways than just in grading student papers for possible plagiarism.  Thus the gradebook feature in Turnitin's GradeMark feature doesn't do much for me.  The fact that you can calculate a grade based on a rubric is nice -- but that grade then ought to go straight into the Sakai Gradebook tool.  With Turnitin, sometimes it did ... and sometimes it didn't.

3.  Related to item 2, I'm glad to see a rubric finally coming to Sakai.  It has a long way to go, but I would much rather see a rubric function that can be used with ANY assignment or lesson than to have one that can only be used when checking a paper for plagiarism.  Similar comments apply to my thinking about peer review functions.

4.  We have found VeriCite to have very snappy performance.  Where papers in Turnitin's queue would unexplainably get clogged and go nowhere, the tight LTI integration between VeriCite and Sakai has completely eliminated those problems.

If you'd like to see a candid discussion between me and two of our faculty about their experiences with Sakai, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3y22i42VSXk.

Thanks,
Martin
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Martin Ramsay, Director
LAMP Consortium
1788 Hwy. 1016, Suite B
Berea, KY  40403-9110
USA
tel. 1(859)986-8702
e-mail: martin at ceath.com
web: www.lampschools.org