Last week I updated the turnitin version in CONTRIB – and I realised there have been a few changes recently, but I haven’t actually mentioned them anywhere! – here is an attempt at some “release notes” for those interested!
- Improved display of errors to both Students and Teachers – errors in the 1000 series are now printed directly to the screen instead of just displaying the error code to teachers.
- A new option to the advanced assignment type has been added to allow teachers to choose when the files are submitted to turnitin – before or after a student has submitted the files for marking. (thanks to Darren Harkness from Athabasca for this patch!)
- 419 error codes were occurring for older assignments due to a bug that has been fixed
- 407 error codes were occurring due to the API calls happening too fast for the Turnitin API to catch up
- 31 error codes were occurring due to files being deleted before submission to Turnitin – a check for file existence was shifted to address this.
- new css class added to similarity links to allow better control in css
- improved error checking and debugging information to various areas.
- A bug with the logic checking for closed activities has been fixed
Hope that’s useful for some people! – I’ve also been talking with the Crot block authors this past week – I’m hoping there’s a way we can integrate the crot and turnitin work so that they are both available via a similar interface!
3 March 09 Edit: looks like I introduced a bug with the single upload assignment type in this last change – should be fixed now!
Hi Dan, your turnitin integration with the assignment module seems much better than the integration offered by turnitin itself. It will be really nice to see this integrated in Moodle 2.0. However, given that Turnitin is not accessible for most Moodle users, the integration will probably not make it into core, right? Will it be available as an assignment module plugin?
Hi Gustav!
Great to hear from you! – Martin has already given approval for me to add this to 2.0 – I just need to find someone to fund my time doing the work!
It’s on the official Moodle Roadmap for 2.0 here:
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Roadmap
It will have a very minor impact on core code – Ideally less than it already does, and Moodle already contains other plugins that are slightly more “commercial” like the paypal plugin.
I’m hoping that we can leverage the Crot block code that has recently been released in a similar manner to the Turnitin integration, which would be great! – then users would have the option to use a free alternative – or both! – but it would need someone to either do the work, or provide some funding so we could get it done!
Thanks Dan, this is great stuff.