Quickstart - setting up a course on Turnitin

Introduction

Turnitin is intended by its Vendor to provide a complete online course environment. Generally at VUW we make use only of a limited subset of the available features, however we are constrained by the system to follow some conventions. The Turnitin system organises itself using a class and assignment model. Classes are owned by a single instructor and assignments are created within a class in order to upload student materials.

Note: An important consequence of this model is that courses which have multiple lecturers/tutors will need to decide who will own the Turnitin course. There is no way to share a course between multiple accounts so it is recommended that either one person take responsibility for Turnitin or a single account be shared - in the latter case please ensure that the password you use is not the same as that used for any other system.

Instructions on setting up a course

1. Connect to the Turnitin system (http://www.turnitin.com) following the instructions in the Accessing Turnitin page if necessary.

2. You should then be taken to the main Turnitin web page listing your classes. It will welcome you:
    
   

3. In the middle of the page is an area that lists your exiting classes:
    
   

4. To add a new class, click on the "add a class" link. A new page will open, with the following panel:
    
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5. Enter in a descriptive name for your class - this will appear on any reports generated by the system.

6. Enter in a password. This is used if students are allowed to upload materials individually to Turnitin, a practice that VUW strongly discourages. Generally you should set this to "password".

7. Choose a meaningful end date for the class using the menus supplied.

8. Leave the rest of the settings at their default values:
    
   

9. Click on the submit button.

10. Provided you have completed the required fields, you will see the list of classes with your new class appearing at the bottom:
     
    

11. If there has been a problem with the information you supply, it will return you to the class creation panel with a notice explaining what the problem is. You will need to fix this and submit again to create your class.

12. Now you have a class, you can:
    • create an assignment so you can upload student work for checking
    • check a single document
    • check a collection of documents