Turnitin LTI 1.3 and Canvas

Although I do not use Turnitin, a few instructors that do have been encountering situations in which students cannot submit an assignment. In a quest to better understand what they are encountering I set up a Turnitin assignment for students in one of my courses. As a backgrounder, the college had uninstalled Turnitin LTI 1.1 prior to installing LTI 1.3. This was apparently not a recommended procedure, Turnitin apparently recommended retaining both during a transition period. This may underlay some of the issues the team here has encountered. 

Location of Turnitin in Canvas Assignments

Integration of Turnitin 1.3 moves Turnitin from the "Submission type: External tools" to a menu external to the Assignments edit screen as seen above. All configuration will be done in an embedded Turnitin frame. 

No Canvas rubric attachment option

The downside is that access to any and all of the flexible assignment set up tools in Canvas are unavailable to the Turnitin user. In addition, Canvas rubrics cannot be attached to a Turnitin assignment. This means that institutions which use rubrics to gather student learning outcome achievement data via rubrics in assignments cannot use Turnitin assignments to provide that outcome data. 

Turnitin assignment setup screen

Note that one of the many losses is the ability to set separate due and available until dates. The only dates that can be set are the start date, due date, and a feedback release date.

One upside is that Turnitin does populate the Coming Up list. This should mean that Turnitin also populates the student's To Do list.

Turnitin also populates the calendar. 

For an exploration of Turnitin behavior all settings were left at their default setting.

Once set up, the Turnitin embedded window appeared as above. I then had students make submissions in class. During this process I took what photos I could. The photos are of different phones, no particular order.

Here a student is working on a phone with some wear and tear suggesting that the phone might be an older model. The submission is happening completely outside of Canvas on the Turnitin website. 

This site and the windows generated by this site were slow to load even on the college WiFi. Home WiFi for most students is far more limited. What loads slow on campus may not load at all out in homes in the villages. This is one of the challenges of using a tool designed for use in institutions in locations where there is high speed broad band available. 

Here on a Windows laptop the student has the option of uploading a submission, using a text input box, or a cloud submission. The cloud submission option permits linking directly to Google Drive documents.

Here a student is in the Canvas interface to the submission screen.

Although blurry, these are the same three submission options but this time as seen on a phone screen. 

This is the Turnitin assignment dashboard. In this instance the student appears to only have the option to upload a file from their phone. While this can be done using Google Docs on Android - the file can be downloaded as a PDF to the phone - this has proven problematic on Apple iPhone12 in the past. A change in the security model appears to block downloading Google Docs as PDFs to the iPhone 12. Whether that is still the case is unknown to this author.

This is the Turnitin assignment dashboard on a laptop. In this instance the assignment has been submitted successfully. Click on the image to enlarge.

Turnitin assignment dashboard on a MacBook Air

Another phone with only the upload submission option. Downloading Google Docs to a phone is not obvious because this is not done from the open document but rather from the Google Docs app opening screen. 

The upload has to be done from the above screen.

Although students had uploaded their documents, there was no notification on the To Do list. This is a known, pre-existing issue: external tools cannot populate the To Do list in Canvas. This was the case for documents done using the Google Classroom external tool and, until recently, was a problem for New Quizzes. I gather that might now have been resolved for New Quizzes.

Another place that the submissions do not appear is in the gradebook. Submissions in Canvas generate an unmarked paper icon in the gradebook. Turnitin does not post this icon to the gradebook, I presume that Turnitin cannot post this icon.

Speedgrader, however, is aware that an assignment has been submitted for marking.

But Speedgrader cannot be used to mark the assignment because the assignment does not appear. This means that one cannot put comments in the comment dialog box while marking the assignment. This is particularly problematic as comments populate the Dashboard in the card mode. Students can click on. comment to jump to the assignment and comment. This means that students will likely have to navigate back to the assignment in the Turnitin embed window to see how they did on the assignment. 

What I do not know is where comments made in the embed window appear.

One has to navigate to the assignment to access the Turnitin embed window. Note that one of the files is a PDF format file, a couple are in Microsoft Word docx format. 

I took too long to click on a pencil icon and received this error message. I think I timed out in about two minutes, but I really do not know. This meant round tripping back out the Assignments screen because, as noted above, refreshing your browser will not resolve this issue.

Well that is a helpful addition. Submissions have to hit a particular length, which is more than the 20 word Turnitin minimum, to make this call. 

This one was too short for AI detection.

This one was long enough for both plagiarism and AI detection. The paper was 0% AI.

This one was too short for AI.

As this was an exercise to explore Turnitin, I had one student submit work copied from elsewhere. This popped a 99% plagiarism match and 0% AI.

Source of the text. The student did receive full credit for this submission.

The resulting grades as they appear in the embed window. I am unclear why the "Viewed" icon remains crossed out. The 12:47 submission was made during class, the others occurred after class. 

The excused marks were manually added to the gradebook using the "ex" code. Only seven students submitted during class. Some students did not bring their phone or laptop. Some students could not load the Turnitin embed window - that process timed out on their phone. 

I specifically asked students to tell if they could not upload a file. None of the students who had a device and who could load the Turnitin window were unable to submit. That said, this was only seven students out of 17 in class. 

One of the barriers to barriers to submission is submitting via upload from a phone. The process of getting a file downloaded as PDF or other format is not obvious. On some phones upload was the only option displayed, other phones showed three options. 

Turnitin LTI 1.3 is functional in Canvas but with the caveats that come with an external learning tool. Comments made in Turnitin may not make it back to the Comments list on the Canvas Dashboard, instructors are not notified of submissions on their To Do list, and Speedgrader cannot be used with Turnitin.