Add a Turnitin Assignment in Moodle

Turnitin assignments differ from regular Assignments in Moodle. Turnitin helps instructors evaluate the originality of students’ work by comparing electronic documents to online sources and the Turnitin database. The software returns an Originality Report which rates submitted assignments and highlights text that appears elsewhere. Faculty can have their students submit their assignments to Turnitin, or they can use it to assess suspect submissions (e.g., assignments without works cited pages, assignments without drafts, etc.).

Adding a Turnitin assignment in Moodle is a two-step process. First, you add the Turnitin assignment to your Moodle course page and edit the settings from within Moodle, you can then open the assignment and make additional settings within Turnitin.

Add a Turnitin Assignment to a Moodle Course

1. Turn on Edit Mode, which is a toggle located on the top right of your main course page.
2. In the Section where you will add a Turnitin assignment, click +Add an activity or resource (at lower-right of section). The Activity chooser will open.
3. In the Activity chooser, select Turnitin assignment. A description of the Turnitin assignment activity appears at right with links to help pages.
4. At the bottom of the Activity chooser, click Add. The Adding a new Turnitin assignment page will open.
5. Configure basic settings for the Turnitin assignment in the set up.
6. At the bottom of the page, click Save and return to course, or Save and display to open the assignment in Turnitin.

Configure Settings in Moodle

When you add a Turnitin assignment activity to a Moodle course, you are required to set the assignment's name, and the Submission Type. The remaining settings are optional. This section describes each setting.

General

• Turnitin Assignment Name (required) This is used as the assignment link on your course page.
• Summary Enter a summary of the assignment and instructions. The Summary will be visible to students when they click the assignment link, or you can select Display description on course page to display the Summary on your course page (best if the Summary is very concise).
• Submission Type (required)
  • Any Submission Type lets students choose to submit either a file or text entry.
  • File Upload requires that students upload a file containing their essay. Acceptable formats include PDF, Microsoft Word, and others.
  • Text Submission provides students with a text box where they can type or paste in the text of their essay. This may work better for shorter submissions rather than essays that have multiple pages and have specifically formatted reference lists.
• Number of Parts Specify whether students can submit multiple parts of their assignment, for example if they are uploading separate sections of an essay independently. This can be used for submitting multiple drafts of an essay.
• Maximum File Size Set the maximum size of the file that students can upload.
• Allow submission of any file type? This setting will allow any file type to be submitted. With this option set to Yes, submissions will be checked for originality where possible, submissions will be available for download.
• Display Originality Reports to Students Specify whether students can see the reports that Turnitin generates. The default is No.Note: Instructors can always see these reports. This setting only determines whether a student can see the report that the instructor received for their submission which can be useful in resolving disputes on originality of the student's work, or for draft submission to allow students to improve citations.