[Using Sakai] Fw: Sakai Turnitin Integration

Fri Feb 27 07:39:25 PST 2015

Scott Siddall asked me to share with the list his response below. My understanding, based on what others had posted, was that VeriCite lacked a feature like Turnitin's Grademark, which allows instructors to "mark up" students' papers with comments -- both on-the-fly comments and pre-written, frequently-used comments. I was wrong, VeriCite does have this capability. I just tried it out at the VeriCite trial site and found that it works nicely and is comparable to (perhaps better than) Turnitin's Grademark functionality.

You can try out VeriCite here: https://www.longsight.com/technologies/vericite-trial-site

Karen

Karen McPhaul
Senior Director, Instructional Technologies
Durham Technical Community College
Durham, North Carolina

________________________________
From: Scott Siddall <siddall at longsight.com>
Sent: Wednesday, February 25, 2015 6:25 PM
To: Karen McPhaul
Cc: Tyler Beason; sakai-turnitin at apereo.org; sakai-user
Subject: Re: [Using Sakai] Sakai Turnitin Integration

Hi, Karen, Tyler...

Our goal in designing VeriCite was to create a simple and focused service for plagiarism detection that is reliable and instant, with a stable integration with the LMS.    VeriCite is meant to be a learning tool that helps the instructor initiate the conversations with students about intellectual property rights.

VeriCite handles grading and commenting, and passes these data back to the Gradebook.  If you've not tried it lately, take another look. We're constantly moving forward with client-driven improvements to VeriCite which you can watch at https://updates.vericite.com.  We considered additional features for grading.  Virtually every LMS provides grading tools and we intentionally decided not to add anything that competes with the host LMS for grade management, which can be confusing.

The technical methods used in VeriCite are different than those used by other services and so we might not expect VeriCite scoring to match precisely in head-to-head tests.   Clearly, they should be similar, however, so we appreciate your feedback.   We're adding about four million sites per day to the VeriCite index of public resources.

VeriCite includes a separate and private comparative repository for papers submitted by each subscribing client institution.    We can "seed" this private repository with papers that have been submitted through your LMS historically.   This quickly improves the levels of matching, especially since it relates specifically to your academic programs.   And finally, we're working to index content that is licensed from publishers into VeriCite (journals, periodicals, texts).  We've talked with publishers and are even exploring means of indexing content that is licensed on a per-institution basis.

So stay tuned!   There's more in the works for VeriCite.

Thanks.

   Scott

On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 5:31 PM, Karen McPhaul <mcphaulk at durhamtech.edu<mailto:mcphaulk at durhamtech.edu>> wrote:
Tyler, thanks for starting this conversation. VeriCite does sound promising, but the loss of Turnitin's Grademark functionality would be huge for a number of our faculty as well. It was disappointing but helpful to learn that Turnitin’s LTI option is horrible. I have not had a chance to try it yet, but had been banking on the hope that it could be a solution for us.

Karen

Karen McPhaul
Senior Director, Instructional Technologies
919-536-7200 ext 5903<tel:919-536-7200%20ext%205903>

Durham Technical Community College
Durham, North Carolina

From: sakai-user-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org<mailto:sakai-user-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org> [mailto:sakai-user-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org<mailto:sakai-user-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org>] On Behalf Of Tyler Beason
Sent: Tuesday, February 24, 2015 4:32 PM
To: Charles Hedrick
Cc: sakai-turnitin at apereo.org<mailto:sakai-turnitin at apereo.org>; sakai-user
Subject: Re: [Using Sakai] Sakai Turnitin Integration

Thank you all for your insight.

We ran a small pilot of VeriCite in the fall. For how young the program is, I think it is quite promising. It includes a list of things that Turnitin does not have (including, in the near future, a working Sakai integration). However, we would lose the GradeMark feature of Turnitin, which is something that many faculty use here. Additionally, we haven't found the matches to be as trustworthy as they were with Turnitin. That problem may very well fix itself over time, but in comparing the tools as they stand currently, Vericite didn't seem to do the job that Turnitin does.

It is very disappointing that Turnitin would essentially drop Sakai support entirely. From testing their current LTI offering, it is simply unusable. If you haven't tested it, please go take a look and see how horrible it is. I agree with Marilyn that we need to put pressure on Turnitin to continue to use this API until they have another workable solution put in place.

Thanks again,
Tyler

Tyler Beason
Graduate Assistant, Instructional Design & Learning Technologies (IDLT) Ext. 2344
Bradley University Quantitative Finance (MSQF) student
Check out my quant finance blog! TBeason.com<http://tbeason.com>
Cell: (217) 273-5357<tel:%28217%29%20273-5357>

On Fri, Feb 20, 2015 at 10:12 AM, Charles Hedrick <hedrick at rutgers.edu<mailto:hedrick at rutgers.edu>> wrote:
I would agree that LTI support isn’t going to work for us. If it looks like API support will vanish in 2015, we’ll have no choice but to move to Vericite.

On Feb 20, 2015, at 5:07 AM, Adam Marshall <adam.marshall at it.ox.ac.uk<mailto:adam.marshall at it.ox.ac.uk>> wrote:

I have CCd this to the sakai-turnitin at apereo.com<mailto:sakai-turnitin at apereo.com> list which is a mail listed dedicated to TuirnItIn. I would recommend that anybody who is interested should join. There’s also a corresponding Confluence page: https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/TII/Home

I’ve been in contact with iParadigms quite a lot recently. We too have been expressing our disquiet at their plans to try to get everybody to use the LTI tool as opposed to the tight integration that we currently have with the Assignments tool. The current way of working works very well for us and the LTI route simple will not cut the mustard.

To be fair, we haven’t looked at the LTI tool yet but for us the main issue is that Faculty only route essays via TII some of the time. It is simply not practical to tell people to only use the LTI tool when they want the essay checked - the students will hate it too: nobody will know which tool to use and confusion will reign.

iParadigms have said that the LTI tool will have extensions so that more info can be passed between systems but as far as we can tell, these extensions wont cover the full gamut of options that are currently provided.

The current API used by Sakai isn’t the latest API – nobody has told me an exact date when this API will vanish but we are sure that its days are numbered.

Oxford has a half-complete integration with the ”new API” (known as TS2) but iParadigms are trying to discourage us from completing it. Up to now we haven’t actually had any time to spend on the coding but this should change in a couple of months. If we are able to continue then any offers of help would be greatly appreciated.

We are in the process of organising a phone conference with iParadigms to try to work – this should happen in the next 2-3 weeks – we’ve had a bit of trouble finding a mutually acceptable date and time. Once we’ve had the chat I will post a summary to the sakai-turnitin list and we can see where we all stand.

Aside from the problems with the API, many institutions in the UK are thoroughly dissatisfied with iParadigms – the service has had some notable outages recently and their communications strategy is possibly the worst I’ve even encountered. Their helpdesk has gone down the pan too.

Adam

--

** Note change of email address to adam.marshall at it.ox.ac.uk<mailto:adam.marshall at it.ox.ac.uk> **

Dr A C Marshall, WebLearn Service Manager, University of Oxford.
IT Services, 13 Banbury Rd, Oxford. OX2 6NN.

From: sakai-user-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org<mailto:sakai-user-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org> [mailto:sakai-user-bounces at collab.sakaiproject.org] On Behalf Of Tyler Beason
Sent: 19 February 2015 20:10
To: sakai-user
Subject: [Using Sakai] Sakai Turnitin Integration

Hello all,

Turnitin has informed us that their API will be discontinued at some point during 2015, which is a shame as that is how we use Turnitin here at Bradley. Unfortunately, we have found the Turnitin Sakai LTI tool to be lackluster (being extremely polite here) and it will not be an option we consider using in the future. I am sure we cannot be the only school that is currently in limbo here with Turnitin, what are some of your institutions looking to use after Turnitin kills their API?

Thanks,
Tyler

Tyler Beason
Graduate Assistant, Instructional Design & Learning Technologies (IDLT) Ext. 2344
Bradley University Quantitative Finance (MSQF) student
Check out my quant finance blog! TBeason.com<http://tbeason.com/>
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--
Scott Siddall
LONGSIGHT
740-599-5005 x801
http://longsight.com
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