Tag Archives: App

Turnitin News: August to September

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This post provides an addendum to the post earlier this month that was directly related to the update of the Turnitin document viewer to feedback studio which took place on the 1st of August.

Issues with Turnitin web-browser based application and the Turnitin for iPad app reported by users at Brighton

Please note: that all issues in this list have been reported to Turnitin and we have active tickets with their support team. This blog post will be updated as we are informed of solutions and have re-tested for issues locally.

14/08/17 – Numerical grades could not be removed from the field provided in the feedback studio

Reported by F.MacNeill in the eLearning team.

After a numerical grade was entered it could not be cleared to be an empty grade if revision was required. In each case where the number was deleted it would revert back to what was previously entered.

RESOLVED on 16/08 by Turnitin support.

23/08/17 – Rubrics are not displaying correctly for marking and eFeedback return purposes

Reported by a member of academic staff.

The rubric tool is not providing scroll bars for the first column of the rubrics when viewed in full-screen view. In cases where the Learning Outcome descriptors exceed a certain length then the text is cut off.

PENDING – reported to Turnitin on 24/08 by F.MacNeill

UPDATE – 01/09/17 still pending a screencast of this issue was sent to Turnitin support to further illustrate the problem.

UPDATE – 05/09/17 has been acknowledged as a bug and we will be updated by Turnitin support when a fix is in-place.

24/08/17 – the rubric tool is not functioning in the Turnitin for iPad app since the app update on August 18th

Reported by two members of academic staff.

Any selections made in the rubric tool on the Turnitin for iPad app are not saving and also are not synchronising to the students’ assignments within Turnitin as we use it through integration with studentcentral (Blackboard).

PENDING – reported to Turnitin on 25/08 by F.MacNeill

UPDATE – 01/09/17 An update for the app was released on the 31st of August. However, after testing we are seeing that when rubric entries are changed the text is erased/hidden from the body of the rubrics. Therefore if you use a rubric, we recommend that you continue to use the desktop version of Turnitin rather than the app.

25/08/17 – characters are being added to the written feedback in place of punctuation when entered via the Turnitin for iPad app since the update on August 18th

Reported by a member of academic staff.

The character “” was supplanted in-place of punctuation in the feedback summary area of the app.

PENDING – reported to Turnitin on 25/08 by F.MacNeill

UPDATE – 01/09/17 still no solution to this after several users have send error log files to Turnitin support. Again we will need to wait for an update to the app.

25/08/17 – issues reported when attempting to review bubble feedback from Google Chrome web browser

Reported by a member of academic staff.

Previously added feedback which had been entered into bubble comments (the floating comments as annotations on the student work) is not consistently opening and displaying detail when accessed via Google Chrome.

PENDING – reported to Turnitin on 25/08 by F.MacNeill

UPDATE – No further information about this issue as of 01/09/17

25/08/17 – issues reported where a QuickMark featuring a longer comment as feedback (3+3) would not save

Reported by a member of academic staff.

The staff person had written a longer piece of feedback in a QuickMark comment as is general practice in their school. Near the point of completion the comment froze and would not save. The following message was then shown: “The request failed because the request for invalid or incomplete”.

UPDATE – There are undisclosed character limits in different fields within the Feedback Studio viewer. These are not displayed nor is the marker warned whern they are nearing the limit. Furthermore, spaces, paragraph lines and hidden characters which might be transferred through the copy/paste of feedback originally written in Microsoft Word all count towards a 2,500 character limit in the comments of a QuickMark.

For information here are the limits which F.MacNeill received from Turnitin Support today.

Characters limit per field related to QuickMarks

  • QuickMark set title – 30 characters
  • QuickMark title – 2,500 characters
  • QuickMark description field – 1,799 characters
  • QuickMark additional comments field – 2,500 characters

Overall Text Comment in the Feedback Summary (formerly General Comments) – 5,000 characters

04/09/17 – issues reported where a QuickMark featuring a longer comment as feedback (3+3) would not save

Reported by a member of academic staff.

The staff member reported that if you accidentally right-click in the Feedback Studio viewer you are then prevented from adding any comments or highlighting text. This was happening on a Mac, in both Firefox and Safari web browsers

This was reported to Turnitin in early September. The issue seems sporadic and a workaround is to press ctrl+r or cmd+r (Mac) keys on your keyboard to refresh the Turnitin Feedback Studio window when it freezes.

Advice as of Friday, 1st of September:

Due to the issues outlined above, we recommend that you complete your marking on a desktop/laptop computer via web browser as opposed to using the Turnitin app for iPad. We will review this advice when we hear more from Turnitin support or when an update for the app is released and tested. We are actively working with Turnitin Support and hope that these issues will be resolved soon.

Tii News: October 2015 – News from the Turnitin User Group

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On Friday, 23rd of October I attended the Turnitin User Group in Westminster, London. The event focused on recent organisational changes at Turnitin, as well updates that we can expect in the forthcoming major release, Turnitin Next. Here is a summary of news from the event.

Turnitin Next

Is currently slated for introduction from March 2016 onwards although this may change based on technical conditions. The introduction will be gradual and staff will be allowed to switch between Next and the current version of Turnitin until they are ready to use the new user interface. When I say that the interface is new, it isn’t that new, it is really an update of the current interface; not so different that you won’t recognise it. Here is a sneaky slide image that I took for reference.

Turnitin Next Photo

In the coming months we will have access to a BETA version of Turnitin Next. During this period we may be able to give interested staff access to the BETA (with the option to switch between current and Next). If you are interested in taking part in this testing window, please contact me at: fdotmacneill(at)brighton.ac.uk.

Some tantalising functions mentioned as part of Turnitin Next

Please note: not all these functions will be available in the first release of Next. There will be iterative updates which introduce new functions.

  • The new Evaluation Viewer (this is their terminology, we normally call it the document viewer) this is what you see in the screenshot above. The initial viewer revamp will be for staff, the student version will follow later (estimated 2nd quarter of 2016).
  • A new version of the Assignment Manager (submission inbox etc.) is planned for the first quarter of 2016.
  • Aspirational changes with rough time-frames:
    • Q4 2015: new Service Level Agreement and improved helpdesk, including revamped help materials available at: https://guides.turnitin.com/
    • Q1 2016: grant individual extensions to specific students
    • Q2 2016: coloured marks to allow the identification of multiple markers on a paper
    • Q3 2016: support for decimal and non-integer grades
    • Q4 2016: peer evaluation – the current peer review tool, PeerMark will be superseded by functionality in next
    • Q1 2017: multiple marker delegation and double blind marking support

There is also a new emphasis on accessiblity at Turnitin, with the adoption of a new Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) with the Paciello Group.

Turnitin research areas

Turnitin has acquired a couple of tech companies and associated technologies. They also have plans to research certain areas. Here is a quick summary of their plans over the next year or so.

  • Q4 2015: Turnitin have acquired MOSS (Measure of Software Similarity) a command line tool for detecting code plagiarism. They hope to integrate this into Turnitin eventually, but may release it to the Turnitin community as-is to begin with…Stay tuned!
  • Q1 2016: research/scoping for an android grading app
  • Q1 2016: research/scoping for support of group work in Turnitin Next

Also of interest…
Turnitin have acquired LightSide (Pittsburgh, USA) and their developers who specialise in machine learning technology now work for Turnitin. LightSide have managed to create automated formative efeedback based on analysis of papers that have already been marked. This is currently only available at the Secondary Ed level in the US and is designed as a way to help students to improve their writing over the course of subsequent drafts, with automated efeedback based on set criteria. It is not designed to replace real feedback from intructors but to provide supplementary feedback for the drafting process (which is something that generally would not be marked). I’ll be interested to see where this goes in the future.

iPad app improvements coming soon

Plans include better syncing and improved password/login. They also plan to add Touch ID support in the future and a student viewer iPad app.

Company changes at Turnitin

Since Turnitin was acquired last year by Insight Venture Partners, they have undergone some major structural and staffing changes.

The key things to know are:

  • Insight Venture Partners have brought in new executive leadership and have put in considerable investment.
  • They now have a Director of User Experience Design, Steph Butler. This is a major step in the right direction in terms of making Turnitin products as user-friendly as possible.
  • They have put a lot of work into improving stability.
  • They are working on improving their customer service and communication with customers.
  • They have moved as a company to an Agile development framework, namely Scrum. This model supports the introduction of small changes and improvements, more often, and means that functions will be added to Turnitin products in iterations, called releases.

Finally… I took part in a Straw Poll on our behalf

  • Coloured marks in GradeMark to indicate different markers – I voted yes
  • Bulk data dump – I voted yes – us LTA folks would like to find out how Turnitin is used through use of more accurate statistical data
  • Word counts in Originality Reports
    • voted for a display of the quoted word count as a separate figure
    • voted for the option not to include the quoted words in the final word count, when exclude quotes from originality report is switched on
  • On-the-paper drawn annotation in both the app and the desktop – I voted yes

So hopefully we will see these features in a future release!

Thanks for reading. Please feel free to leave comments below, if you have questions.