{"id":187,"date":"2012-03-06T09:02:19","date_gmt":"2012-03-06T09:02:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/danmarsden.com\/blog\/?p=187"},"modified":"2012-03-06T09:02:19","modified_gmt":"2012-03-06T09:02:19","slug":"future-of-moodle-turnitin-plugins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/danmarsden.com\/blog\/2012\/03\/06\/future-of-moodle-turnitin-plugins\/","title":{"rendered":"Future of Moodle Turnitin plugins"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>Ever since Moodle 1.5 I\u2019ve enjoyed developing the Turnitin integration which has resulted in the new Plagiarism API in Moodle 2 &#8211; now we have plugins for <a href=\"http:\/\/moodle.org\/plugins\/view.php?plugin=plagiarism_urkund\" target=\"_blank\">Urkund<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/moodle.org\/plugins\/view.php?plugin=plagiarism_crot\" target=\"_blank\">Crot<\/a>, <a href=\"http:\/\/moodle.org\/plugins\/view.php?plugin=plagiarism_moss\" target=\"_blank\">Moss<\/a> and hopefully more to come!<\/p>\n<p>I started developing the Turntin integration while working for Lincoln University and playing with the Turnitin basic assignment type developed by Turnitin which didn\u2019t really suit our requirements. Since then a company called nLearning (now part of Turnitin) developed a 3rd plugin called \u201cMoodle Direct\u201d &#8211; so there are now 3 different ways of connecting Moodle to Turnitin.<\/p>\n<p>Independently developing the Turnitin plugin has presented a range of challenges &#8211; including:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>\u00a0Keeping in touch with new features\/improvements to Turnitin services and implementing them in my plugin.<\/li>\n<li>Providing support to people who have downloaded the plugin and have a contract with Turnitin but no support contract with me &#8211; I\u2019ve spent a lot of volunteer time helping via e-mail\/forum support but this can be quite time-consuming. It can also be confusing for people using the plugins &#8211; not knowing who to contact related to a problem.<\/li>\n<li>Diagnosing issues can prove difficult &#8211; is there an issue with the code\/Turnitin (Kudos to the Turnitin Devs who have provided a lot of support directly to me while developing\/improving the plugin)<\/li>\n<li>Enabling my plugin can be a convoluted process, emails to Turnitin, extra configuration required&#8230;<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Where am I going with this you ask? &#8211; Turnitin are working directly with me to \u201cmerge\u201d their \u201cTurnitin Direct\u201d plugin with my plagiarism plugin for Moodle 2.x &#8211; this will bring a range of very good benefits.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Single support base &#8211; support for the plugins will come direct from Turnitin for all plugins making it much easier to access support.<\/li>\n<li>Larger feature-set available &#8211; my focus has been on the originality checking feature &#8211; Turnitin provides a range of other features which will be implemented and supported in both plugins.<\/li>\n<li>Moodle admins will be able to choose between using the plagiarism plugin which uses the existing assignment types or to use a separate &#8220;turnitin&#8221; module.<\/li>\n<li>The new plugin will be backwards compatible with data stored from my version. (planning to use the same tables)<\/li>\n<li>The new plugin will sync grades entered via Grademark with Moodle.<\/li>\n<li>The new plugin will support the existing featureset (and more).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Obviously there will be some form of changeover period where I will continue some level of support for the existing plugin but sites will be migrating to the newer version provided directly from Turnitin &#8211; Turnitin are hoping to provide the new code in a git repo and allow others to contribute patches back (I know I\u2019ll probably be submitting a few in the long term)<\/p>\n<p>This is all very new and there isn\u2019t a specific time frame in place to have this completed except to say that you should keep an eye out for the initial code release in the upcoming months.<\/p>\n<p>Thanks to everyone who has tested\/provided feedback\/provided patches\/provided funding for the plugin &#8211; it\u2019s been a cool project to be involved with. Now that the core plugin will be supported directly from Turnitin I may finally have time to implement the plagiarism api into other areas of the Moodle codebase like forum posts, workshop mod, Essay quiz questions etc &#8211; or maybe I\u2019ll just waste away more time on SCORM&#8230; \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ever since Moodle 1.5 I\u2019ve enjoyed developing the Turnitin integration which has resulted in the new Plagiarism API in Moodle 2 &#8211; now we have plugins for Urkund, Crot, Moss and hopefully more to come! I started developing the Turntin integration while working for Lincoln University and playing with the Turnitin basic assignment type developed [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,13],"tags":[3,7],"class_list":["post-187","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-moodle","category-turnitin","tag-moodle","tag-turnitin"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/danmarsden.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/danmarsden.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/danmarsden.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danmarsden.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danmarsden.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/danmarsden.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":190,"href":"https:\/\/danmarsden.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187\/revisions\/190"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/danmarsden.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danmarsden.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/danmarsden.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}