A monthly digest by Gai

  • Are your unit guides published?
  • Active Learning Platform is coming – S2
  • Upcoming Workshops
  • Misconception: that Turnitin detects plagiarism – An article on Turnitin  worth reading
  • Are you seeing this?

Readying Unit Guides for S2

A quick note following the unit preparation process for S2:

External Unit Guides are to be published by 19th June 2017

Internal Unit Guides are to be published by 24 July 2017

Please refer to the Unit Guide Policy for further details


Active Learning Platform

All units will need to have the old Echo360 block removed in all iLearn units and replace it with the new Echo360 Active Learning Platform block. Instructions on how to do so can be found here.

Arts L&T team will be doing this for all Arts units. If you have activated your units in iTeach, then we will change the block over the next few weeks. If you see the old ECHO block in your iLearn unit at the start of session, please place a ilearn.help@mq.edu.au ticket.


Upcoming Workshops

The Arts L&T team & LIH are excited to be offering these workshops in July. We will be add more in the coming weeks. Keep an eye on the events page in Teche


Misconception: that Turnitin detects plagiarism

Article published at: http://turnitin.com/en_us/component/content/article?id=1643:does-turnitin-detect-plagiarism

Lots of people have impressions about Turnitin – what it is, what it does, how it works. Unfortunately, many of these impressions are based on misconceptions. So to kick off our new blog, we’ll tackle the #1 misconception: that Turnitin detects plagiarism.

But isn’t that what Turnitin is – a plagiarism detector? No, Turnitin does not detect plagiarism per se; Turnitin just finds text that matches other sources in the vast Turnitin databases and shows those matches. It is up to a human being to determine whether those text matches are a problem or not.

It is important to realize that the Similarity Index is NOT a “plagiarism index” – there is no score that is inherently “good” or “bad”. 0% does not necessarily mean that everything is OK with the student’s paper and 75% does not necessarily mean that the student should flunk. You have to look at the report and decide: what is going on here?

The Turnitin originality report shows the paper’s text highlighted with any text that matches sources found in the Turnitin databases containing vast amounts of web content, previously submitted papers, and subscription-based journals and publications.

It is up to the person looking at the matches to decide whether the writer’s intent matters. Some people care about intent; others do not. Sometimes it matters; sometimes it doesn’t.

Since plagiarism is one of those topics that gets people all riled up (like politics and religion), there is no shortage of discussion on what it is, why it is complicated, and what to do about it. This is an important conversation with lots of shades of distinction – and that conversation should continue as today’s “digital natives” have become the “new normal” and they have a very different way of relating to content.

So does Turnitin detect plagiarism? No – Turnitin offers a tool that helps educators (and their students) make informed evaluations of student work rapidly and move on to the important task of discerning what their students need in the way of instruction, correction or judicial action


Are you seeing this?
– Gradebook Quirk

gradebook - extra creditSo, you just cloned your S1 unit in to S2 and checked the gradebook setup in your cloned unit. You see a ‘+’ next to the grade. What should you do? – place a ilearn.help@mq.edu.au ticket.

Posted by Gai Ramesh

Senior Learning Designer, Faculty of Arts

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