Project: Content Review

Lead(s) Turnitin: Former user (Deleted),  Adam Marshall

Maillist: sakai-turnitin@apereo.org

Forum:  https://groups.google.com/a/apereo.org/d/forum/sakai-turnitin

Lead(s) Compilatio: Frédéric Agnès, Former user (Deleted)

Lead(s) Urkund: Jonas Lundqvist, Former user (Deleted)

Summary

The Content Review project provides a set of API's for plagiarism prevention service plugins for Sakai. A back-end that uses the 3rd-party Turnitin service is currently available for production use although this will need to be replaced with a new IMS LTI-based integration by the end of 2016. It should also be possible to create implementations for other 3rd-party services which work in a similar way such as Ephorus, Longsight's VeriCite, Compilatio and Urkund.

Sakai (version 11.2 and above) supports this 3rd-party implementations:

• Turnitin service
• VeriCite
• Compilatio
• Urkund

Status Updates Regarding Content Review

25-May-2018 Update about Western's Implementation of Turnitin's LTI into Sakai's Assignments

Message from Shawn Foster about discontinuing work on the LTI implementation of Turnitin for Sakai's Assignments/Content Review:

Hello, everyone.

I wanted to provide an update to the Sakai Community about the work that we at Western University have been doing on the implementation of Turnitin's LTI connection for Sakai's Assignments tool and Content Review.

Please note: I do not work for Turnitin and do not provide customer support for Turnitin's products. I am sharing these details as a member of the Sakai community and a member of a Sakai institution that uses Turnitin and contributes code to Sakai.

Short Summary:

This year, I have been in discussion with Turnitin's Integrations teams and have learned that they are working on updates to their integrations. While speaking with them, both parties have decided that the LTI implementation of Turnitin in Sakai's Assignments will no longer be required when their new offerings are available in Sakai in the next year or two. Turnitin has confirmed that they will keep their Legacy API available until the new offerings are available.

We have decided that instead of having Sakai schools switch from using the Legacy API to using the LTI implementation and then switch again to the new offering in a year or two, it will be less disruptive for schools to switch their Turnitin implementation once to the new offering when it is ready.

With this new plan, Western will cease work on porting our Turnitin LTI implementation of Content Review to Sakai Master, as it will no longer be needed by the Sakai community.

For other Sakai schools using Turnitin in Sakai's Assignments tool, my advice is to continue to use the current Turnitin Legacy API until Turnitin's new Content Review implementation in Assignments is available. Turnitin has informed me that their LTI connection is still available to link to Turnitin as an external tool using BasicLTI (separate of Sakai's Assignments).

More details about the history of the LTI implementation and how we got here is summarized in my "Additional Background Details" message below and on the Sakai wiki:
https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/TII/Home

If you have any questions about this decision, please feel free to contact me directly.

If you have questions about Turnitin's upcoming offerings, Turnitin will be presenting at the Open Apereo 2018 conference in Montreal in June. There is still time to register for the conference. Please see the conference website for more details:
https://www.apereo.org/conferences/open-apereo-2018


-----


Additional Background Details:

As you may recall, in 2014 to 2016, Turnitin communicated that their LTI integration would replace their Legacy API that Sakai was using for our existing implementation of Turnitin in Sakai's Assignments tool (via Content Review). At that time, Turnitin wanted their clients (and the Sakai integration) to switch to using the new LTI integration, as they would be turning off the Legacy API by the end of 2016.

A Sakai Community initiative began around the end of 2014 and early 2015, led in part by Adam Marshall from Oxford University and others, to create an implementation of Turnitin's LTI connection in Assignments. Work continued through to early 2016, when Oxford (and others) had to switch their development resources over to their local upgrades to Sakai 11.

In mid-2016, we at Western University took over the work that Oxford had done to get the LTI implementation working smoothly in Assignments for our local Sakai 10 production environment. We released this local implementation in August 2016 and tweaked it during our Fall term of 2016. We began work to contribute our local implementation back to Sakai 11.

At the same time, Adam was in discussion with Turnitin throughout 2016 about the impending December 2016 deadline for the Legacy API. Turnitin indicated that they might be able to maintain the Legacy API until our LTI integration was ready and deployed by Sakai schools using Turnitin. In January 2017, Turnitin's Integration team confirmed that they would not remove the current Legacy API until our LTI implementation was complete and institutions had moved to the new integration.

In early 2017, Western began our local upgrade to Sakai 11, which completed at the end of August 2017. After September, we resumed our development work to get our implementation of Turnitin LTI into Sakai Master (for inclusion in the upcoming Sakai 12). However, during this time, the (much-needed) Assignments refactor of its underlying code was taking place and the code was changing daily. In October 2017, we decided to halt work on the Turnitin LTI implementation until the Assignments code stabilized following the refactor work.

This year, I have been in discussion with Turnitin's Integrations teams and have learned that they are working on updates to their integrations. While speaking with them, both parties have decided that the LTI implementation of Turnitin in Sakai's Assignments will no longer be required when their new offerings are available in Sakai in the next year or two. Turnitin has confirmed that they will keep their Legacy API available until the new offerings are available.

We have decided that instead of having Sakai schools switch from using the Legacy API to using the LTI implementation and then switch again to the new offering in a year or two, it will be less disruptive for schools to switch their Turnitin implementation once to the new offering when it is ready.

Therefore, Western will cease work on porting our Turnitin LTI implementation of Content Review to Sakai Master. We will probably continue to use our local LTI implementation and work with Turnitin on a migration path to their new offering.

For other Sakai schools using Turnitin in Sakai's Assignments tool, my advice is to continue to use the current Turnitin Legacy API until Turnitin's new Content Review implementation in Assignment is available. Turnitin has informed me that their LTI connection is still available to link to Turnitin as an external tool using BasicLTI (separate of Sakai's Assignments).

Details of the process and timeline that I've summarized here can be found in the Sakai wiki:
https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/TII/Home

If you have any questions about this decision, please feel free to contact me directly.

If you have questions about Turnitin's upcoming offerings, Turnitin will be presenting at the Open Apereo 2018 conference in Montreal in June. There is still time to register for the conference. Please see the conference website for more details:
https://www.apereo.org/conferences/open-apereo-2018

3-Apr-2018 Updates to the Sakai mailing lists

Message from Shawn Foster in response to a thread asking about Turnitin in Sakai 12:

We at Western University have our implementation of the Turnitin LTI integration running in our local Sakai 11's Assignments and Content Review. Last year, we continued to port our integration to Sakai Master, but our upgrade to Sakai 11 last Spring and Summer was our priority and prevented us from finishing the porting work before the Sakai community branched the Sakai 12 code in August. Therefore, our implementation of the Turnitin LTI integration is not in Sakai 12.

The recent Assignments refactor (yey! looking forward to it!) meant a lot of code changed between Sakai 11 and Master/12. We halted work on the porting of our integration implementation in October 2017 while the changes to Assignments were still happening. We are scheduling to restart the work now that the Assignments code has stabilized and Sakai 12.0 has been released. Our work will focus on getting our implementation into Sakai's master codebase for inclusion in a future version of Sakai to be determined based on the timing.

I have updated the Content Review page in Confluence with the recent updates:
https://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/TII/Home  

Like with Sakai 11, the advice for schools using Turnitin in Sakai's Assignments tool is to continue to use the current Turnitin legacy API. Unlike Sakai 11, you won't need to use the Sakai Contrib tool for Turnitin. Conveniently, this is now built into Sakai's Content Review and just needs to be configured in sakai.properties to use it. This is similar to any of the four supported Content Review providers (as far as I'm aware): Turnitin, VeriCite, Compilatio, Urkund.

Please see the README file in Content Review for more details:
https://github.com/sakaiproject/sakai/tree/12.x/content-review

(Alternatively, you can add Turnitin as a Sakai Basic LTI tool using Turnitin LTI credentials to work on its own as a separate tool from Assignments for students to submit directly to Turnitin - but you will not have the Sakai Assignments functionality.)

I hope this clarifies the use of Turnitin in Sakai for anyone moving to Sakai 12.

Please note: I do not work for Turnitin and do not provide customer support for Turnitin's products. I am sharing these details as a member of the Sakai community and a member of a Sakai institution that uses Turnitin and contributes code to Sakai.

21-March-2018 Sakai 12.0 released

Sakai 12.0 is released by the Sakai community.

Content Review now is built into core Sakai to use any of the four providers (Turnitin, VeriCite, Compilatio, Urkund). You can enable and configure Content Review in sakai.properties. See the Content Review ReadMe for more information.

For Turnitin in Sakai 12, use the current legacy Turnitin API, as the LTI integration for Content Review is not ready and the legacy APIs are still functioning.

March 2018

Shawn Foster has been in contact separately with members of the Turnitin integration team and the VeriCite team to discuss the future of their products and how they will affect Content Review integrations in Sakai. New offerings are coming, as the companies have mentioned below, but no official announcements or details have been released yet. Existing integrations should be unaffected for the foreseeable future, so continue to use the existing integrations until further notice.

9-Feb-2018 Acquisition of VeriCite by Turnitin

Turnitin acquires VeriCite:

http://turnitin.com/en_us/resources/blog/2686-vericite-and-turnitin-are-joining-forces

https://vericite.com/docs/VeriCite_PressRelease-02-09-18.pdf

Future of both products seems unclear, yet the companies have mentioned that VeriCite customers can continue using their existing service at the same price. The document above also mentions "Turnitin will be launching a range of new academic integrity solutions in Summer 2018". The future of the integrations of both Turnitin and VeriCite is unclear, so we recommend continue to use the existing integrations until further notice.

19-Oct-2017 Update about Turnitin LTI porting progress to Sakai

Western University has halted work on porting the Turnitin LTI integration for Content Review to Sakai Master because of the ongoing changes to Assignments as a part of the Assignments Refactor project. Too many changes are happening to the Assignments code to efficiently and properly integrate the integration. Western will resume porting from their Sakai 11 instance to Sakai Master when Assignments in Master stabilizes.

3-Oct-2017 Update

Western University is working on porting the Turnitin (TII) LTI integration into a branch for Sakai master. They are currently running their version of the LTI integration with Sakai 11 locally; however, it requires heavy refactoring because of the recent changes to Assignments (refactored), BasicLTI, and Content Review. These additional changes and considerations will require more work and more time for the TII LTI project.

More details will be posted when available. No timeline right now, as the additional work is still being investigated and worked on (and there are still external changes being made to Assignments for the Assignments Refactor project during Sakai 12 QA separate from this TII project).

7-Jun-2017 Update from Sakai Project Meeting at Apereo Conference

Shawn Foster clarified that Western will build the IMS LTI integration into Sakai Master - this will probably not be completed before the end of August.

There is a chance that the full integration won't be ready by the time that the Sakai 12 branch is cut, ie, in time for Sakai 12.0, in which case the plan is to ensure the new DB structures are in 12, if necessary, to make it easy to add LTI support in a point release.

Shawn clarified that due to issues with the TII LTI interface, when a multi-part submission is made it is not currently possible for grades to be sent back to Sakai. It is thought that in order to get this to work, TII will need to modify their interface and then work will need to be done in Sakai. This will be raised with TII in the future.

Western is currently running a version of the LTI integration with Sakai 10.3, and will be running a version of the LTI integration within Sakai 11, however, they have no plans to make a "10.x patch" or "11.x patch" available to the community. If any institutions want to run the LTI integration with 11 then funding / resources will have to be found. This caveat will be raised with TII in the future.

18-Apr-2017 Clarification about TurnItIn integrations from Brian Jones

Brian: You can use the legacy Turnitin API in Sakai 11.x [1]; Turnitin has extended the lifetime of this API until further notice.

The Turnitin LTI integration will be coming for Sakai 12. We are still fine tuning the LTI integration locally (at Western Uni, Ontario), and plan to contribute it back to the community after we're done our local upgrade to Sakai 11.3. At some point in the future (likely after the LTI integration has been completed in full), Turnitin may elect to revoke access to the legacy API.

[1] https://github.com/sakaicontrib/turnitin/tree/sakai-11.x-legacy

25-Jan-2017 Update

Since January of 2017, Content review also supports Urkund, another option for the plagiarism prevention service.

The instructions to enable the integration are available in Github following this link Urkund Antiplagiarism or visit the Confluence space Contrib: Urkund Antiaplariasm Home

13-Jan-2017 Update (Adam Marshall)

Oxford and Western Universities had a phone conference with the TurnItIn Integrations team on 10-Jan-2017 at which TurnItIn confirmed that they would not remove the current API until the Sakai LTI integration was 'complete' and institutions had moved to the new integration. It was decided that the completed integration would be written in such a way that it works with Sakai 11 and 12 but not with any earlier versions. It was mooted that the work to complete the Sakai 11 integration would start mid-way through 2017.

The work required to 'complete' the integration is in 3 parts

1. Update the IMS LTI integration to fit with recent improvements to Sakai content-review API
2. Update the integration in line with the recommendations made by TurnItIn, for example: 
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3. Complete any outstanding gaps in functionality, for example,  Unable to locate Jira server for this macro. It may be due to Application Link configuration. Unable to locate Jira server for this macro. It may be due to Application Link configuration. Unable to locate Jira server for this macro. It may be due to Application Link configuration. Unable to locate Jira server for this macro. It may be due to Application Link configuration.  and others

4/1/2017 Update (courtesy of Neal Caidin)

There has been a lot of discussion about changes to Sakai core code to keep up-to-date with changes to the Turnitin plagiarism detection tool for Sakai 11.

Summary

The plan for the new Turnitin integration, based on LTI, is targeted for Sakai 12 and probably will not be backported to Sakai 11. It is not recommended to use the new Turnitin LTI integration in production in its current state right now.

Sakai 11 will continue to use the legacy Turnitin API, which is still supported by Turnitin, until further notice. An LTI integration might be available for schools who want it for Sakai 11 in the future, pending available resources.

Details

Turnitin is replacing their existing legacy APIs with LTI (IMS Learning Tools Interoperability). Originally, the community's understanding was that Turnitin would turn off the legacy APIs by the end of 2016 (this year), but that does not look to be the case anymore.

Institutions in the community have been working on implementing the new Turnitin LTI integration into Assignments to eventually replace the legacy Turnitin API. The initial work by the University of Oxford was targeted for the release of Sakai 11.0. More work was needed after the release of Sakai 11 to match the functionality of the legacy API and to handle the differences of the new LTI integration.

The University of Western Ontario (Western) has been working since early summer 2016 to adapt Oxford's LTI integration for their production Sakai 10 instance and to improve the integration in preparation for a later Sakai 11 minor release. Western is running a heavily-modified version of the LTI integration in their Sakai 10 production environment - successfully since the end of August.

Western was intending to contribute their Turnitin LTI integration improvements to Sakai 11 for 11.3. However, the Sakai Core team recently asked them to adapt it for Sakai 12 instead. Since the new LTI integration touches several areas of Sakai that have changed between Sakai 11 and (what will become) Sakai 12 (including Content Review, Assignments, and BasicLTI), the Sakai Core team believes it is best not to include the Turnitin LTI piece in the 11.3 maintenance release and instead focus on Sakai 12.

It is not recommended to use the Turnitin LTI integration in production in its current state. Therefore, the Sakai Core team recommends institutions on Sakai 11 continue to use the legacy Turnitin API until the new LTI integration is ready for Sakai 12.

Western will continue to work on the Sakai 11 LTI integration for their local upgrade to Sakai 11 for Spring 2017 and may be able to share this integration with other schools in the future, pending their available resources. Once they have the integration working solidly for their Sakai 11 instance and they have some development resources, they'll contribute their fixes back to Sakai master.

Please direct any questions to sakai-turnitin@apereo.org email group (you must be subscribed - sakai-turnitin+subscribe@apereo.org).

9/11/2016 Update

Since November of 2016, Content review also supports Compilatio Service, another option for the plagiarism prevention service.

The instructions to enable the integration are available in Github following this link Compilatio Antiplagiarism or visit the Confluence space Contrib: Compilatio Antiplagiarism Home

15/06/2016 Update

There is a special page about IMS LTI integration for Turnitin. We are currently working with Entornos de Formacion, Rutgers and UWO to try to get this new integration into Sakai 10.8 and Sakai 11.1. Many thanks to all those who are helping.

28/04/2016 Update

The new IMS LTI integration for Turnitin is now complete. The code is due to be released as part of Sakai 10.8 and Sakai 11.1. I have included an update from Earle Nietzel - I just want say a huge public “THANKS” to Earle and Longsight for offering to help in getting the new Turnitin code into sakai 11.1. We are extremely grateful for their help.

I would like to take a moment to update the community on the upcoming changes for content review.

Content Review in Sakai has always seemed like a step child, many pieces of content review existed in different locations even repositories.

It was decided the this is just a bad approach and we should include all the pieces required to use content review OTB, and someone should be able to just turn it on with a sakai property.

Currently in master the content-review module has been completely revamped, see https://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-30207.

A ContentReviewFederatedService starts up an configures which implementations to activate, see http s://github.com/sakaiproject/sakai/tree/master/content-review. By default a NOOP service is configured OTB. All of the implementations are now conveniently located in the content-review module and not in a separate repo.

There is a new turnitin implementation that has just been completed (lead by Oxford) which will be replacing the current turnitin implementation which will expire. This new turnitin implementation is being adapted to the new content-review module and will be added to master shortly.

As a result this ongoing work it doesn’t make sense for it to have an effect on the upcoming 11.0 release for obvious reasons. However it does need to be included so that those wishing to use the new turnitin implementation can do so. Once the new turnitin implementation has been added to master and QA’d a new 11.x-CR branch will be created which will contain all the new content review changes for 11. Once 11.0 is released this branch will be merged back into 11.x and the following release 11.1 will contain all the new content review changes.

This represents the current and best way to bring the content review changes to 11.x without affecting an 11.0 release schedule. Caveat, while this represents the current plan to meet the communities needs it doesn’t mean that anything is written in stone, if some choices arise that will serve the community better they will most definitely be considered.

Sakai PMC/Core Team Member,

Earle Nietzel

Longsight

24/02/2016 Update

First of all, many apologies on the lack of progress reports about progress with the new Sakai-Turnitin integration, there's no real excuse other than that I haven't had time to compose reports as I've been totally snowed under with work.

The good news is that the coding is progressing well, we have almost completed the work and I hope that I will be asking for volunteers to test the code quite soon.

There are inevitable differences from the previous integration, some positive (resubmissions and multiple files per submission are allowed, marks from Markbook will be sent back to the Assignments tool) and some negative (we cannot provide a link directly to an Originality Report (one is instead taken to the Assignments Inbox) and a handful of other things, mainly 'edge cases').

The new code will not work at all with Assignments 2

7/10/2015 Work Started on Replacement Code

We are pleased to announce that the project  to replace the integration code has finally started. The work is laid out on the separate U-TIC Project page.

14/09/2015 Business Requirements

This is on a separate Business Requirements page

3/06/15 Things to fix in new integration

This is on a separate Integration Issues page

15/04/2015 BoF at Apereo conference  confirmed (Adam Marshall)

There will be a Turnitin BoF at the conference, I'm currently not sure about the scheduling.

I'm happy to lead but am also happy for others to give mini-presentations if needs be. It may be interesting to have 5-10 mins on the current LTI tool I know nothing about it at all. It could be useful background info?

In my bit I'll aim to outline what iParadigms are proposing regarding the new integration / API, what the implications are for the Sakai community and what the implementation schedule will look like. Then we can all have a chat and make some plans.

23/03/2015 Clarification of the different TurnItIn APIs (Adam Marshall)

TurnItIn offers 2 main APIs, I find the terminology confusing so I asked iParadigms and posted their response below. The latest Sakai 'content review' code uses the Legacy API, prior to that the Open API was used but I'm not sure of the version where the switch-over happened.

• Open API:
  • oldest API used for integration
  • was once publicly available to anyone
  • integrations did not get assigned an integration ID - so we could not identify who was connecting to Turnitin through this method (which makes it harder to identify the badly behaving integrations)
• Legacy API:
  • utilises same codebase as the Open API
  • not as bad as Open API - each Legacy API integration has been assigned an integration ID for easier tracking and identification 

20/3/2015 The future of Sakai - TurnItIn integration (Adam Marshall)

Matthew (Buckett) and I finally had the long-awaited conference call with Jessica Wells, Alex Bell and Gary Carr from iParadigms. The purpose of the call was to establish a route forward for the Sakai - TurnItIn integration and to answer a number of outstanding questions that we have compiled on behalf of the Sakai community.

The headline news is that iParadigms are putting a lot of effort into ensuring that future Sakai integration will look much the same as it currently does to the end-user. That is to say, it will be possible for the Sakai community to write brand new integration code for the Assignments tool (and others if necessary) that will replicate the current functionality.

iParadigms are NOT proposing to force Sakai to use the IMS LTI "external tool" route of integration. It is true that the new integration would pass some information around in an IMS LTI 1.1 standards compliant manner, but there are also a whole host of "custom extensions" to the LTI spec which allow tight integration with the Assignments tool. The IMS LTI spec can be used to pass marks back to the Gradebook tool.

The fact that the integration is based on IMS LTI is not that important, it may help to think of iParadigms offering a brand new API which we will need to code against.

The other headline is that the API that is currently used by Sakai will not be withdrawn until a suitable replacement exists. In other words, the current integration will not suddenly stop working: iParadigms are committed to ensuring that the switch-over to the new back-end is as smooth as possible.

We did raise a few questions that require clarification from iParadigms, these were in the area of error handling: what happens if TurnItIn tries to return some information to Sakai whilst the service is down for maintenance, or whilst the network is unavailable?

The documentation is available at: <https://guides.turnitin.com/03_Integrations/Learning_Tools_Interoperability_(LTI)/Turnitin_LTI_Custom_Setup_Guide_Future_Parameters>. Please post questions / comments about this to the sakai-turnitin@apereo.org list - Jessica is a list member and will be able to respond accordingly.

iParadigms do not expect the proposed extensions to be available for use until May / June 2015 so code development could not start until then.

I hope that this positive outcome will dispel some of the worries that have been circulating of late. I for one am quite pleased with how things seem to be panning out.

28/11/2014 - Another New Method Of Integration (Adam Marshall)

iParadigms sent this communication n 12 Nov 2014. "To offer advanced functionality to our LTI integration customers, we have implemented custom LTI extensions to give customers more flexibility with the integration. We've actually since made more of these which are not yet documented. With the LTI extensions, the student can continue to submit into Sakai, and Sakai can programmatically pass the file over to us if appropriate. We have not implemented these in Sakai, but we see a need for them and so wanted to discuss with Sakai code contributors the possibility of working together to have these included in future iterations of Sakai."

It is not 100% clear what is happening to the TS2 code but it looks like it is being superseded.

Watch this space!

28/02/2014 - New TurnItIn API (Adam Marshall)

iParadigms intend to withdraw the current (2012) API. New "TS2" integration code, which is located at: https://github.com/ox-it/wl-content-review2, has been developed against a brand new API and, when complete, should be the library that all institutions use. Unfortunately this code is not yet finished (Feb 2014) and we would welcome any collaborative efforts from the community to take the matter forward.

In a change to previously reported policy, individual Sakai community members no longer need to sign the "ConnectItIn" agreement - I was told that the MoU between Sakai and iParadigms covers the use of the new API by Sakai: http://collab.sakaiproject.org/pipermail/announcements/attachments/20131107/cf61b064/attachment-0001.pdf

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. Please enter details lower down on this page.

Interested in TS2?

We need developers, code reviewers, testers, technical writers, and early adopters. Please signup here and indicate what role you would be able to play.

Update May 8, 2012

An updated set of instructions for new users has been made available for the Turnitin Content Review Service. It is necessary to follow these guidelines going forward as the 'Open API' option is no longer available.

The guide can be found here

New Stuff! April 27, 2011

Version 1.0 of the Content Review Service is nearly complete. Instructions and release notes are in progress here

Status

August 2012

Tunitin Content Review 0.8

A branch of the Turnitin content review implementation has been released, which adds the following:

• Integration with GradeMark - This allows instructors to set a grade via the Turnitin Document Viewer and have that grade reflected in the Sakai gradebook
• Additional Assignment 2 options - adds support for ETS Erater
• Migration from the Open API
• Multiple Instructors - Allow instructors who haven’t created a Turnitin assignment on Sakai to access the Turnitin Document Viewer

Installation instructions can be found here

Turnitin Content Review 0.5

Version 0.5 of the Turnitin Content Review implementation is considered stable and in production use at several universities. Information on deploying and developing against it can be found here.

Schedule

Turnitin CR 0.5 is currently stable. Outside of occasional bug fixes there is not any major feature development under way.

Implementation Sites

Planned Work

Oxford has secured funding to work on further integration. We will be circulating plans as they emerge - this will probably not be until 2012.

Links

JIRA project: http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/TII
Turnitin Integration Spec/Discussion: http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/SAKDEV/TurnItIn+Integration
Early Estimate/Design: https://source.sakaiproject.org/contrib/assignment2/trunk/docs/tii-estimate.html

There has been a lot of discussion about changes to Sakai core code to

keep up-to-date with changes to the Turnitin plagiarism detection tool

for Sakai 11.

Summary

The plan for the new Turnitin integration, based on LTI, is targeted for

Sakai 12 and probably will not be backported to Sakai 11. It is not

recommended to use the new Turnitin LTI integration in production in its

current state right now.

Sakai 11 will continue to use the legacy Turnitin API, which is still supported by Turnitin, until further notice. An LTI integration might be available for schools who want it for Sakai 11 in

the future, pending available resources.

Details

Turnitin is replacing their existing legacy APIs with LTI (IMS Learning

Tools Interoperability). Originally, the community's understanding was

that Turnitin would turn off the legacy APIs by the end of 2016 (this

year), but that does not look to be the case anymore.

Institutions in the community have been working on implementing the new

Turnitin LTI integration into Assignments to eventually replace the

legacy Turnitin API. The initial work by the University of Oxford was

targeted for the release of Sakai 11.0. More work was needed after the

release of Sakai 11 to match the functionality of the legacy API and to

handle the differences of the new LTI integration.

The University of Western Ontario (Western) has been working since early

summer 2016 to adapt Oxford's LTI integration for their production Sakai

10 instance and to improve the integration in preparation for a later

Sakai 11 minor release. Western is running a heavily-modified version of

the LTI integration in their Sakai 10 production environment -

successfully since the end of August.

Western was intending to contribute their Turnitin LTI integration

improvements to Sakai 11 for 11.3. However, the Sakai Core team recently

asked them to adapt it for Sakai 12 instead. Since the new LTI

integration touches several areas of Sakai that have changed between

Sakai 11 and (what will become) Sakai 12 (including Content Review,

Assignments, and BasicLTI), the Sakai Core team believes it is best not

to include the Turnitin LTI piece in the 11.3 maintenance release and

instead focus on Sakai 12.

It is not recommended to use the Turnitin LTI integration in production

in its current state. Therefore, the Sakai Core team recommends

institutions on Sakai 11 continue to use the legacy Turnitin API until

the new LTI integration is ready for Sakai 12.

Western will continue to work on the Sakai 11 LTI integration for their

local upgrade to Sakai 11 for Spring 2017 and may be able to share this

integration with other schools in the future, pending their available

resources. Once they have the integration working solidly for their

Sakai 11 instance and they have some development resources, they'll

contribute their fixes back to Sakai master.

Please direct any questions to sakai-turnitin@apereo.org email group

(you must be subscribed - sakai-turnitin+subscribe@apereo.org).

Thanks for your attention