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U of T recently decided to make some changes to the programs they use for online learning, including stopping using Turnitin, a plagiarism detection service, and Blackboard Collaborate (Bb Collaborate), a web conferencing tool .
U of T will now use Ouriginal, a plagiarism detection service similar to Turnitin, which is directly integrated into Quercus. The change follows a report that is a Increase in reported academic offenses at U of T in the past year, which the report attributes in part to the COVID-19 pandemic and the transition to online learning.
Turnitin’s job
U of T’s move from Turnitin to Ouriginal went into effect on September 1st. According to Susan McCahan, Vice-Provost Academic Programs, the change came after the university contract with Turnitin ended, which meant that U of T could explore other plagiarism detection options.
“Ouriginal meets our educational, functional, privacy and tax requirements,” said McCahan, explaining that the software is “a similarity detection solution that combines text matching with writing style analysis to promote academic integrity and prevent plagiarism.”
Ouriginal can also check for similarities between newly submitted work and previous work from the same degree program. Loud on Announcement of the Academic & Collaborative Technologies Group, community consultations with instructors showed that being able to compare submitted work with previously submitted work is important in avoiding what they refer to as “given assignments”.
According to the announcement, Ouriginal is able to compare new submissions to extensive old work – including, in some cases, work submitted in the past 15 years.
Since Ouriginal is accessed through Quercus, there won’t be any significant changes to the way faculty and students interact with assignment inputs. This means that the work submitted through Quercus will be analyzed by the Ouriginal software without the student submitting the work directly through Ouriginal, similar to what Turnitin did in the past.
The changes are due to an increase in reported student offenses, which, according to last year’s report on academic misconduct, rose by 35 percent in the 2019-2020 academic year.
In an academic integrity report, an advisory group noted that this increase may be related to the pandemic and the associated transition to online learning, which has led U of T to rely heavily on academic integrity software due to the loss of personal life must support supervising.
Termination of Bb Collaborate
Due to the expiry of another supplier contract, U of T will also stop using the webinar software Bb Collaborate for courses and meetings. The end of use took effect on August 31st. Professors can continue to use alternative virtual course solutions like Microsoft Teams and Zoom Education while the university completes a procurement process.
Since the decision to end Bb Collaborate was made shortly before the start of the fall semester, some lecturers felt the change abruptly. Avi Hyman, director of academic technology at U of T, sent an email apologizing to previous Bb Collaborate users for possible misunderstandings.
“We received some direct feedback from the instructors about these changes, ranging from very positive feelings about the changes to some concerns,” McCahan wrote. “To address any concerns and assist in the transition, we have put in place additional support for trainers, including additional staff, improved documentation and training from the Center for Teaching Support and Innovation and Departmental [Educational Technology] Offices.”
In an email to The varsity, Michael Dennison, a session instructor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, wrote that he chose Bb Collaborate because it was built into Quercus but didn’t offer the same functionality as some other programs. He added that, in his opinion, the change won’t have much of an impact on students as other programs are available.
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