Tii News: May & March 2015

Post Date Adjustment on Anonymous Submissions

28th May: An issue arose which affects anonymous submissions. If the post date on an anonymous submission point is changed to be closer to the current date and the current time then there is an issue which causes the numerical marks to be erased. Turnitin Support are aware of this problem and were able to supply us with some data so that we could backup our marks (eFeedback and QuickMarks were left in place). However assurance could not be provided as to when the marks would be returned to the Turnitin inbox. Tii Support think that the marks may return around the date of the original post date.

PeerMark Assignment

28th May: There have been continuing reports that when using Turnitin’s PeerMark Assignment tool, marks are not passed through to the Grade Centre.  Turnitin Support are aware of the problem but, at the time of writing, a fix has not been found.

Service Disruption Related to the Document Viewer

18th May: Between 2:00pm and 5:00pm some users experienced very slow load times when attempting to use the Document Viewer. @TurnitinStatus reported the issue at 4:23pm. The issue with the Document Viewer would have affected instructors who were working on marking and students who were reviewing their submissions or trying to access eFeedback.

End User Licence Agreement

12th May: For a short period in the morning, some users will have seen a User Agreement box when setting up a new submission point and not been able to continue without confirming agreement.  Similarly, some students would have encountered the same box if submitting assignments during that time.

This was an error. After contacting Turnitin Support, who then contacted the engineers, the box was removed later in the day.

Service Disruption, 6th May 2015

6th May: Many institutions, including ourselves, reported issues when accessing Turnitin on the 6th May.  Turnitin were aware of the problem but the cause lay with our network service providers, JANET, who confirmed there were faults with connections to some online services, including the Online Library and TurnItIn, since 8.00am.

JANET have been working to re-route connections and restore access to all affected services.  An update posted on Twitter (@jiscmi) at about 12.30pm on the 6th May, is captured in the image below.

March News

To ensure that students do not have access to marks and feedback before the Post Date, the ‘Reveal grades only on post date’ option should always be set to ‘Yes’.  This automatically hides the corresponding column in the Grade Centre, thus not allowing students to view any data therein via their ‘My Grades’ section of Global Navigation.

When the Post Date arrives, the system should un-hide the column automatically, but there have been reports that this does not happen.  In March, Turnitin Support advised that “Engineering has confirmed that there is a known issue with Blackboard Basic [our integration] where the grade column does not become visible on the post date for the students despite the settings. The engineering department is currently working on resolving this issue as soon as possible. Currently, we do not have an estimate of when the fix will be ready. As a workaround, the instructor can manually “unhide” the column so that the grades become visible to the students.”

Always check the Grade Centre, to make sure the column status is what you need it to be, ie, either hidden (students cannot see their marks) or un-hidden (students can see their marks).