Considering the Use of Turnitin

Earlier this week an article from Inside Higher Ed (IHE) caught my eye. Sign with hand and text reading prevent plagiarism. In New Salvo Against Turnitin (June 19, 2017) Nick Roll summarizes an essay by Sean Michael Morris, Instructional Designer in the Office of Digital Learning at Middlebury College, and Jesse Stommel, Executive Director, Division of Teaching and Learning Technologies at the University of Mary Washington. The essay authors argue that faculty should rethink the use of Turnitin, questioning not only “…the control and use of people’s data by corporations…” but “…Turnitin’s entire business model, as well as the effects on academia brought on by its widespread popularity.” Morris and Stommel further contend that those using Turnitin “supplant good teaching with the use of inferior technology” reducing the student-instructor relationship to one where suspicion and mistrust are at the forefront. [Turnitin is a software application used to detect plagiarism, and Morris and Stommel are not the first to decry the company’s business model and practices.]

Although the IHE article provides a fair summary, as well as additional comments by Morris and Stommel, it is worth reading the 3,928 word essay—A Guide for Resisting Edtech: The Case Against Turnitin (Digital Pedagogy Lab, June 15, 2017)—to appreciate the complex argument. I agree with some of the concerns the authors address and feel we should be doing more individually and collectively to school ourselves and our students in the critical evaluation of digital tools, but disagree with what I feel are over-simplifications and unfair assumptions. Morris and Stommel cast faculty who use Turnitin as “surrendering efficiency over complication” by not taking the time and effort to use plagiarism as a teachable moment. Further, they state that Turnitin takes advantage of faculty who are characterized as being, at the core, mistrustful of students.

The assumption that faculty using Turnitin are not actively engaging in conversations around and instruction of ethical behavior, including plagiarism, and are not using other tools and resources in these activities is simply not correct. The assertion that faculty using Turnitin are suspicious teachers who are embracing an easy out via an efficient educational technology is also not accurate.

The reality is that some students will plagiarize, intentionally or not, and the Internet, social media practices, and cultural differences have rendered complicated students’ understanding of intellectual property. I believe that many of our institutions of higher learning, and faculty and library staff therein, make concerted efforts to teach students about academic integrity. This includes the meaning and value of intellectual property, as well as finer points of what constitutes plagiarism and strategies to avoid it.

I believe it is relevant to note that Middlebury College’s website boasts a mean class size of 16, while the University of Mary Washington lists an average class size of 19. Student-faculty ratios are 8 to1 and 14 to 1 respectively.  I cannot help but feel that Morris and Stommel are speaking from a point of privilege working in these two institutions. Instructors who teach at large, underfunded, state universities with classes of hundreds of students, relying on a corps of teaching assistants to grade their essays, are in a different boat.

The authors state: “So, if you’re not worried about paying Turnitin to traffic your students’ intellectual property, and you’re not worried about how the company has glossed a complicated pedagogical issue to offer a simple solution, you might worry about how Turnitin reinforces the divide between teachers and students, short-circuiting the human tools we have to cross that divide.” In fact, we may all be worried about Turnitin’s business model and be seeking a better solution. Yet in this essay nothing more concrete is given us on those human tools and how faculty in less privileged circumstances can realistically and effectively make use of them.

The Innovative Instructor has in the past posted on Teaching Your Students to Avoid Plagiarism (November 5, 2012, Macie Hall), and using Turnitin as a teaching tool: Plagiarism Detection: Moving from “Gotcha” to Teachable Moment (October 9, 2013, Brian Cole and Macie Hall). These articles may be helpful for faculty struggling with the issues at hand.

Yes, we should all be critical thinkers about the pedagogical tools we use; in the real world, sometimes we face hard choices and must fall back on less than ideal solutions.

Macie Hall, Senior Instructional Designer
Center for Educational Resources

Image source: Microsoft Clip Art edited by Macie Hall

Quick Tips: Tools for Creating Rubrics

The Innovative Instructor has previously shared posts on the value of using rubrics (Creating Rubrics, Louise Pasternak, November 21, 2014 and Sharing Assignment Rubrics with Your Students, Macie Hall June 26, 2014). Today’s Quick Tips post offers some tools and resources for creating rubrics.

Red sharpie-type marker reading "Rubrics Guiding Graders: Good Point" with an A+ marked below

Red Rubric Marker

If you are an instructor at Johns Hopkins or another institution that uses the Blackboard learning management system or Turnitin plagiarism detection, check out these platforms for their built-in rubric creation applications. Blackboard has an online tutorial here. Turnitin offers a user guide here.

If neither of these options are available to you, there is a free, online application called Rubistar that offers templates for rubric design based on various disciplines, projects, and assignments. If none of the templates fit your need, you can create a rubric from scratch. You must register to use Rubistar. A tutorial is available to get you started. And you can save a printable rubric at the end of the process.

Wondering how others in your field have designed rubrics for specific assignments or projects? Google for a model: e.g., “history paper rubric college,” “science poster rubric college,” “video project rubric college” will yield examples to get your started. Adding the word “college” to the search will ensure that you are seeing rubrics geared to an appropriate level.

With free, easy to use tools and plentiful examples to work from, there is no excuse for not using rubrics for your course assignments.

Macie Hall, Senior Instructional Designer
Center for Educational Resources

Image source © 2014 Reid Sczerba

 

 

Faculty Office Hours: The Instructor is In

Peanuts comic showing Lucy in the psychiatrist's booth, re-labelled to say "Course Help Free; The Instructor is In."What if you hold office hours and nobody comes? That’s the issue that Dr. Richard Freishtat, Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at UC Berkeley addresses in Don’t Be Alone During Office Hours (Tomorrow’s Professor, January 10, 2017). He describes a student panel at Berkeley on facilitating student success. When the student panelists were asked by a faculty member about attending office hours, there was silence. Why was this opportunity not being pursued? One student responded, “Reason #1: ‘I think office hours is for students who are struggling with the material and need extra help. I wouldn’t want my professor to know I’m struggling, even if I was.’ Reason #2: ‘I was fascinated by the Professor, the discipline, and research in the field beyond what we were focusing on in class. I would have loved to drop into office hours and just talk with my professor about her own research, but figured there’s no way she’d want to take the time to do that with me.’” Faculty in the audience expressed just how much they would appreciate students coming to see them for the latter reason.

Freishtat goes on to suggest some ways to increase student attendance at office hours including making it an assignment, telling students how to use/what the purpose is of office hours, explaining to students how to start an office hours conversations (bring a question, a quote of interest, a story), scheduling varying days and times to accommodate different schedules, and promoting office hours throughout the semester/quarter.

For more on practical measures to take to improve the participation and outcome of your office hours, see the Stanford Teaching Commons website on Office Hours That Work and the University of Washington Center for Teaching and Learning on Face to Face Office Hours.

Macie Hall, Senior Instructional Designer
Center for Educational Resources

Image Source: CC Image from Flickr [https://www.flickr.com/photos/frederickhomesforsale/16107671226] modified by Macie Hall