EAST LANSING, Mich. — Starting this fall, Michigan State University faculty and students will have access to a new tool that will help them teach students the finer points of writing, especially in the digital environment.
MSU has entered into a three-year pilot program with Turnitin, a cloud-based suite of tools that instructors have the option of using to help improve writing and enhance students’ understanding of what it means to appropriately give credit to the work of others.
Turnitin is being integrated into ANGEL, the learning management system MSU currently uses.
One of the features of Turnitin, Originality Check, “raises awareness of the rules of attribution by assisting faculty and students in detecting work that must be cited,” said Douglas Estry, MSU associate provost for undergraduate education.
“Plagiarism is the most reported type of academic dishonesty.” he said. “The biggest reason for this appears to be a lack of understanding of appropriate citation rules.”
Turnitin also offers an application called Grademark which provides grammatical analysis and documentation of student performance based on faculty-designed guidelines.
Another Turnitin feature is iThenticate, which is designed to provide originality checking of scholarly publications and graduate theses and dissertations.
Graduate students and faculty also will be able to check the originality of their documents, including journal manuscripts, against the Turnitin database, using the IThenticate application.
Information on how to use Turnitin is available at the ANGEL Help site. Additionally, two separate training sessions are set for Thursday, Sept. 6, from 10 a.m.-12:30 p.m. and from 1:30-4:00 p.m.
Both sessions will be in the Main Library. Interested faculty and instructors can enroll for one of the “Online Writing Evaluation with Turnitin” sessions through EBS.
For additional information, visit the Turnitin website at www.turnitin.com
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