TurnItIn Integration

A place to gather requirements for a new TurnItIn integration with Sakai. (See also existing TurnItIn implementation.)

11/10/2013 - New TurnItIn API (Adam Marshall)

As far as I know, iParadigms intend to withdraw support for the current API ("the Sakai API") in December 2014. There is a replacement API which the Apereo Foundation has permission to program against. details are here: Sakai Turnitin Home

The University of Oxford is part-way (60-70%?) through yet another Sakai - TurnItIn integration rewrite but unfortunately does not have time to work on this until at least October 2014.

I would like to collect a list of institutions who use TurnItIn via Sakai with a view to setting up a consortium who can help Oxford develop and support the new integration. Oxford simply doesn't have the resources to do this alone.

01/08/09 - Turnitin-Sakai Integration/Patch Functional Specification v.2.0

Happy New Year everyone!
Sorry for the delay in posting, but I've attached a revised functional specification after incorporating feedback and suggestions.
Just an update - after talking with Indiana University as well as the LAMP schools, it seems that the Assignments 2 tool is almost completed and shooting to be deployable by May/June of 2009 and included in Sakai 2.7. It makes sense for us to try and build to that if that is going to become the standard. While there are a good number of differences between Assignments 1 and Assignments 2, the concept of how the integration/patch would work and the touch points are essentially the same, it's just that the UI will be different and how we implement it on the back end would be different.
We're looking to be a part of their pilot and hopefully can begin development soon against Assignment 2.

11/04/08 - Turnitin-Sakai Integration/Patch Functional Specification

As promised, Unicon has finished the initial draft of the specification, and it is attached to this wiki page (see attachments) for your review and feedback.

Please send comments, feedback and questions to:

David Wu, iParadigms, davidw@iparadigms.com

As mentioned in my previous email, please try and get the feedback back to us by 11/18.

This is a great step in moving forward to building out a tight integration, and I look forward to hearing from you.

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In an effort to spearhead the development of a Turnitin-Sakai integration/patch, as mentioned in my previous email copied below, iParadigms, in conjunction with UNICON, has begun the process of coming up with a functional design/specification of what a Turnitin-Sakai integration would look like. UNICON is helping us to write the document, and we expect the initial draft to be ready by 11/4. We are hoping to allow interested parties to give their feedback on the document, which would help us have a better idea of how our customers would like to see the integration work or help us find areas we didn't take into consideration. However, because we are on a timeline, we'd like to get this feedback as soon as possible, preferably within two weeks from 11/4. Hopefully this advanced notice will help you allocate some time and resources to be able to look at this within the given timeframe. We hope to begin development based on this specification at the end of the two-week period.

Please be aware that this integration/patch will be for the Assignments 1 tool in Sakai (we hope to be able to adapt this to the Assignments 2 tool when it is ready and in production, which we've heard is scheduled for Sakai 2.7 to be released in Summer 2009 – please let us know if this is incorrect).

You can send your feedback and suggestions to myself and/or our contact at UNICON, Kate Valenti. More details to come when we send out the document on the 4th.

We hope that this document will present an integration that will be the most useful for Sakai users, and thus your feedback would be very helpful. Please feel free to pass this on to any other interested parties you might know of.

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My name is David Wu, and I am the lead developer for integrations at iParadigms, the makers of Turnitin. Over the past few years, we've had increasing requests for an integration between our Turnitin product and Sakai, and we've been exploring different ways that this might be best accomplished.

I've put out this announcement on the developers list, but I didn't get too many responses, and I thought I'd try it here, to see if there is any interest.

"iParadigms (the makers of Turnitin) have been hearing from various clients over the past couple of years interest in an integration between Sakai and Turnitin. We would definitely like to collaborate and work on such a project. We are aware that the University of Cape Town has already developed an integration for their own needs, and we think that is a great start. With the development of the new assignment tool in Sakai, we'd like to take this opportunity to take an integration even farther by making sure that our integration will work with this new assignment tool and that it will integrate and work nicely with the built-in features of Sakai. To do so, we'd like to come up with detailed requirements and specifications of what this integration would look like, hopefully to be generated by those universities that are interested in such an integration, so that we know that what we should build will be as much of what the people who are going to be using it want. Also, in developing this integration, we know that we could go the route of trying to do it ourselves, but seeing as how I am not familiar with Sakai like many of those in the community, an integration done by ourselves might take a lot longer to develop and not be done in the best, most-efficient, complete way. We believe that if there are developers out there who are much more familiar with Sakai, the APIs, the right functions to use, the right places to insert code, etc., and that they are willing to work with us on this, that would be the best way to make the integration. Our team would be willing to learn and help develop on the Sakai end however we can, and of course we would develop the Turnitin side of the API and any other hooks, etc. that would be needed to make the integration with Turnitin work. We would like to see who out there would have the time and the resources to help in coming up with the requirements and specifications as soon as possible and then passing that around to get as much feedback as possible. From there, we would also like to see who out there would have the time and resources to help in developing the integration on the Sakai end. We are definitely interested in getting this started, rolling and finished as quickly as possible, and we look forward to working with you on it."

However, though there were a couple of institutions that responded, we haven't gained much traction. It seems there is interest, but not a lot of available resources to help work on the integration.

I'd still like to try to get a few interested institutions involved, but it was also suggested to put out there if that institutions could not put in people resources into working on such a project, perhaps they might have budget to help fund an integration where Turnitin could work with a commercial/contracting development group to help us design and develop this integration to get the ball rolling.

Please let me know if you're interest and capabilities lie in either area. I appreciate your feedback.

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Requirements for Turnitin/Sakai Integration (draft)

1)     All accounts must be based on the course owner or instructor of record.

2)     The UI should be based on current - known - views that instructors have used in the past

3)     Authentication to Turnitin should be passed from Oncourse without requiring a reauthentication

4)     Submissions, and types of submissions need to be dependent on the assignment'sparameter - single vs. multiple submissions of a single papera)     

• Support option to allow students to see "Originality Reports"
• Support option to allow submissions after the due date (dependent on assignment late submission policy - currently in place with assignment tool)
• Allow other papers to be checked against submissions

5)     Allow for submission comparison against these search targets:

• General student paper database
• Current and archived internet
• Periodicals, journals, & publications
• Local institutions' paper database kept by Turnitin

6)     Originality Report options should include:a)     

• Exclude Quoted
• Exclude Bibliography

7)     Instructor report view should include:a)     

• Sort by frequency of occurrence
• Paper ID for administration and support

Recommendations for Next Steps (excerpted from email from Stephen Marquard)

The current TII integration does still submit everything as a single TII account.The issues that have arisen are basically that when someone else (e.g. at another U.) requests access to a paper submitted through Sakai, we get the request centrally.
Similarly, if someone at UCT requests access to a paper elsewhere, the request email has our central email address rather than the individual's email addr. This has been a low-volume issue for us so hasn't risen to the top of our priority list.

[REQ:Goodrum - what about matches within the same institution? Are those papers automatically available to other instructors at the same institution without requiring a request?]

The issue we've been thinking through (and discussed a little bit some time back with David Wu) is how to handle the association between site and assignments, given that in Sakai there could be multiple instructors in a course and there isn't a clear association between an assignment and an instructor.

We think what needs to happen is something like this:

- If you request access to another submission (through viewing an originality report from a link on Sakai), then the request should be sent as you (i.e. your own email addr) rather than the generic contact address. This may be tricky to implement because it could require Sakai to check that you have a Turnitin account when you login to Sakai. UCT and some other universities also want multiple people to be able to view originality reports (anyone with grading permission in the assignment), and not all of them may have TII accounts (e.g. some may be TAs rather than instructors).

- If someone else requests access to a submission through Sakai, Turnitin should mail a contact email address for the site, which Sakai is responsible for resolving to an email to the current instructor(s) for the site. Complications could include a request for a site in a previous year where one or more of the instructors have left. Maybe the Sakai site needs a config option to define who send incoming requests to. From the TII side, this would effectively be creating a pseudo-instructor per site, rather than a global one.

I suspect both of the above issues will be affected by different policies at institutions.