Exploring the teaching and learning potential of Turnitin
Annette uses Blackboard to grade and give feedback to learners but has not used Turnitin. She seeks to extend her use to Turnitin and compare both for grading. Irene, in contrast, has used Turnitin solely for its originality reporting and has never used the grade and feedback facilities. They both want to experiment with an advanced use of Turnitin to enhance the student and teaching experience. This picture seems to reflect the experience of many lecturers who use Turnitin ‘a bit’ but not to any great degree leaving a lot of the Turnitin’s potential untapped.
Both of us wished to jointly explore a journey into a more holistic use of Turnitin with the intention of publicising our findings and conclusions from the project among peers and colleagues who might be interested in extending their use of Turnitin.
Technology enhanced learning
Apart from the obvious anti-plagiarism benefits of using Turnitin, we both feel that a whole approach to using Turnitin would help students learn to navigate digital learning platforms more readily. The one-stop shop model that Turnitin promises, also helps us as teachers locate many tasks (originality feedback and grading using the Turnitin rubric) within the one space.
Student engagement and learning
When used to its full potential, Turnitin has the possibility of leading students to taking each other in the Turnitin skill-sets we have. Over two months, we collaborated on key Turnitin assignments, one for 4th year Corporate Finance students and one for 1st year Academic Writing students. The findings were collated and analysed, and recommendations we made.
Digital literacies
This project is a key digital literacy enhancement project both from the perspective of the teachers and the learners. The positive use of Turnitin has been proven (not just for the avoidance of plagiarism) but as a learning tool available through digital platforms that encouraged other teachers to engage. We believe that Turnitin has the potential to promote academic behaviours such as enhanced writing and attribution skills and also facilitates lesser-acknowledged behaviours, such as autonomous learning and improved digital confidence in learners.
Click on the links below to view Irene’s blog posts:
Click on the links below to view Annette’s blog posts: