Turnitin is a web-app with useful classroom enhancement functionality. It is a tool that doesn't really do anything that isn't already done by teachers & students but probably makes a number of processes a lot easier. It is not a catch all VLE but is nicely put together and does claim integration with other VLEs (Moodle, Blackboard, ANGEL). It lacks a few features that should be easy to implement and that would complement what they already have quite nicely (customisations of certain data fields for example) but overall I have a positive impression of the tool's capibilities and potential for adoption.
One of the most innovative features that turnitin provides is that of plagiarism detection. Impressively turnitin keeps its own database of online sources against which it checks submitted papers. One of their videos claims the addition of 50000 to 100000 papers a day and 200 webpages a second to the database. They also claim some pretty impressive plagiarism detection times for the student submissions but they don't talk at all about detecting plagiarism within a class - are we to take it as granted that the system does this?
The marking system is pretty standard functionality wise. However what is nice is that the papers can be viewed online and marked up using highlighting and annotation tools. They have a 'QuickMark' library which the instructor can customize that contains any number of keywords/phrases and descriptions of them. The instructor can quickly insert any keyphrase into the paper and the students can then access the full description of these annotation when they are reviewing their corrections. The only problem with this correction system is that the onine view is not in the original submitted format, just a plain text listing. Charts, tables and formatting are missing. To view the original the teachers must download the files and review them on their system before making corrections. There is also a customizable 'Rubric Library' in their correction system which allows for efficient marking of papers. Again the students can have access to the rubric so that they can see where they went wrong.
The calendar feature gives account holders nice overal views of submission, correction, review & other event dates. There are also discussion forums & peer review with the at least some of the appropriate safety measures.
There is a lot of information on turnitin.com including some nice demo videos. I only took a look at the instructor perspective when looking over the tool so I may have missed a lot.
turnitin.com
