Category: Turnitin

Dear All
The “Turn it in” software provider are currently experiencing problems with all UK submissions http://submit.ac.uk/en_gb/services/system-status
We are monitoring the situation and will update you as soon as we have more details.

If you are submitting an essay to Turnitin via our Blackboard system you are likely to experience delays (the pages will load slowly). For staff you will find that the originality reports will take a significant time to appear.
Regards
Joseph Gliddon
Learning Technologist

Turnitin’s latest update  includes the option for Instructors to choose to allow any file type as a submission. Although Turnitin will not produce Originality Reports for all file types, this provides the ability to give/receive feedback using Grademark on files for which Originality Reports cannot be generated, and files that cannot be displayed in the Document Viewer. This includes images, music, video, and other file types. Turnitin have provided the following information about this new feature:

Instructors will see a new assignment setting when creating or editing Paper assignments in Turnitin. The new setting will appear below the assignment name and point value fields, and will have two options: “Allow only file types that Turnitin can check for originality” and “Allow any file type”.

The system default will remain “Allow only file types that Turnitin can check for originality”. The requirements for generating an Originality Report have not been changed, they are:

• The file must be less than 400 pages in length
• The file must be less than 20 MB
• The file must contain more than 20 words of text
• The file must be in one of these file formats: Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, WordPerfect, PostScript, PDF, HTML, RTF, OpenOffice (ODT), Hangul (HWP), Google Docs (submitted via the Google Drive submission option), plain text files.

If “Allow any file type” is selected, any file that is less than 20 MB and that is less than 400 pages in length will be allowed to be submitted. If the submitted file meets the requirements for generating an Originality Report (listed above) an Originality Report will be created for the file.

For more information, go to Turnitin’s Help Centre and search for “allow any file type”. If you have any questions, please contact tel-help@bristol.ac.uk.

Turnitin have announced that their services may be intermittently unavailable during a maintenance period on Saturday, March 1, 2014 from 3 pm to 7 pm. Turnitin recommend that instructors modify any assignment due dates to either before or at least several hours after the maintenance window.

We recommend that any Turnitin submissions be postponed until 9 am on Monday, when local support will be available.

There have been reports of some issues affecting Turnitin submissions since Turnitin implemented an upgrade on January 23rd. The issues are intermittent and have straightforward workarounds, which are outlined below. Turnitin are aware of these issues and are working to rectify them.

Firstly, some digital receipt emails may not have been sent to submitters. In these cases, although the submission has been completed successfully, the email confirming this has not been delivered. Submitters can check that the submission was successful within Turnitin, and can also download a pdf version of the digital receipt from there.

Secondly, some Turnitin submissions may not be showing in the Grade Centre, even though they were successful and can be seen in the assignment inbox in Turnitin. This workaround for this issue is to edit the Turnitin assignment settings, and then save them without making any changes – this will trigger the data to be resent.

Further information about these issues can be found on the Known Turnitin Service Issues website.

Please accept our apologies if you have been affected by any of these issues.

Turnitin have slightly changed their assignment submission workflow for instructors and students. This change is specific to users submitting a single file to Turnitin directly via Submit.ac.uk and through the Blackboard integration.

More information (including screen shots) can be accessed here

If you have any questions or feedback please email Tel-Help@bristol.ac.uk.

Turnitin have reported that the earlier problems with the service have been fixed, and the system is operating normally now.

There are currently problems with the Turnitin UK service and some users may be receiving error messages and having trouble completing submission.

Turnitin have confirmed they are aware of the problem and are working on it.

If you have students submitting directly to Turnitin, please ask them to try again later. You may also want to consider extending the deadlines for submissions due today.

We will keep you informed, as we receive information from Turnitin, via this blog.

If you have any questions, please email TEL-Help@bristol.ac.uk