Learning and teaching

Turn-it-in

While Turn-it-in is primarily known as an originality check tool, there are many other features that can make marking a more efficient process beneficial for both staff and students. Such features as audio recording as well as rubrics have a potential to improve feedback practices; Quick marks can help with unifying feedback practice across the units. To read more about each feature click on the headings below.

Originality report

Plagiarism is a common problem amongst university students. Using software that can detect to what extent students' work is original is the first step in trying to combat bad practice. Turn-it-in compares the submitted assignment against other sources available online such as journals, e-books, websites and work submitted by other students and looks for similarities. It is important to remember that the Originality report does not detect plagiarism but highlights text that was found in other sources. Further checking is needed to determine whether the work was cited properly.

The videos below offer a step by step guide to understanding originality report in Turn-it-in.

Written feedback

Turn-it-in allows you to enter two types of written comments, i.e. write comments directly in the text or create bubble comments that are attached to the text. The video below outlines different ways of providing feedback via Turn it in.

Audio feedback

Audio feedback can be very beneficial to both students and the lecturers. A separate page has been created to discuss the pedagogical rationale behind audio(visual) feedback as well as provide practical advice as to what to focus on and how to get started. The discussion here will only relate to guidance on how to embed audio feedback in Turn-it-in.

Comment banks

One of the issues with providing good quality timely feedback is heavy workload and lack of time. There are, however methods of recycling feedback that can provide students with detailed feedback of good quality at no extra cost to the lecturer. You don't need a lot of technical skills to create comment banks.Turn-it-in can facilitate that through using to create comment banks. University of Ulster comment banks can be a useful resource.

Using rubrics

Using rubrics can providing students with feedback that helps them identify the link between their grade to the marking criteria. There are different types of rubrics in Turn it in to explore.

Additional resources

  • Using rubrics to mark presentations described from a  tutor perspective with some thoughts from the students
  • Using Blackboard rubrics to grade video assignments –Production Skills for Journalists Northampton University
  • Using Rubrics for effective, efficient and transparent feedback at Manchester MET.
  • A collection of examples of various Rubrics from Eberly Centre for Teaching Excellence

Student faced resources

The educational research, and professional experience at Greenwich shows that quite often the lecturers do provide feedback in Turn-it-in, either as overall comments or audio messages, however the students do not know how to access it and therefore conclude that no feedback has been given. It is important then to educate students on how to access e-feedback that is returned to them. below are examples of guides created by other universities outlining and explaining different features of Turn-it-in and how to use them: