Higher Education Course Management Integration

Overview

Northwestern College is a 2,000-student liberal arts college based in Iowa. Academically rigorous and technologically forward-thinking, the college realized the pedagogical benefits of providing a connected environment for its students. However, it also realized that access to web resources for pressured students was a temptation to compromise their learning by plagiarizing. The college, therefore, subscribed to Turnitin.com’s plagiarism prevention service – a growing trend among higher education institutions. The only problem: most papers were submitted as paper copy and, therefore, could not be submitted to the online service. Even if papers were submitted in digital format, it was too time-consuming for the professor to manually feed each received submission into Turnitin.

Northwestern College first purchased Synapse - Lance Technologies’ course management system – to provide a more efficient and cohesive framework for web-based collaboration between students and faculty. Next, the college contracted with Lance Technologies to integrate Synapse with Turnitin.com for real-time, transparent assignment submissions to the system’s online plagiarism detection system. With this combination, Northwestern College faculty process 1,200 paper submissions to Turnitin a month – driving unprecedented value from their licensing fees while keeping faculty workload the same.

Problem

Northwestern College has subscribed to the Turnitin.com service - a recognized worldwide standard in online plagiarism prevention. Turnitin helps educators and students take full advantage of the internet's educational potential. Used by thousands of institutions in over eighty countries, Turnitin's products promote originality in student work, improve student writing and research skills, encourage collaborative learning, and save valuable instructor time.  However, despite the benefits of using the service to ensure integrity in students’ work, very few Northwestern College faculty were using it for a simple reason: most student submissions were paper based and it wasn’t worth the extra work to have students submit electronically and have to manage all the emailed submissions. Deploying Lance Technologies’ course management system helped significantly since it provided faculty with an easy-to-use framework for working with electronic submission. However, Turnitin usage was still quite low. Most faculty simply did not want to deal with a separate login and yet another system to learn. There was also the problem of having to still submit each student file manually.

Solution

Lance Technologies worked closely with Northwestern College and Turnitin.com to integrate the college’s course management system with Turnitin. The end result was a highly user-friendly integration that allowed professors to create assignments in the course management system and with a single selection, opt to have all assignment submissions processed through Turnitin for plagiarism detection. Just as it took a single click to set up assignments to process submission via Turnitin, it took a single click to check plagiarism results as well.

The integration developed by Lance Technologies automatically synchronized student enrollment information with Turnitin and just as transparently allowed Turnitin results to be displayed directly in the course management system. Even access credentials were communicated transparently, thereby eliminating the need for professors to sign in to Turnitin.

With this system in place, faculty find that they have to expend no additional effort to ensure the integrity of students’ papers. As a result, over 1,200 papers are being submitted to Turnitin per month from Northwestern College – a record number that tells a tremendous return-on-investment story.