5 Days of EMA with Turnitin – Day 2: Creating a Turnitin Assignment

Assessment Lifecycle: Setting and Supporting

Setting the assignment details is a key part of the Assessment and Feedback Lifecycle. Such details include: what is required from the student? What format it is required in? And when and how it will be assessed? This stage in the lifecycle’s primary aim is to ensure clarity for academics, administrative staff and students in assessment process.

At this point in the process,you would normally provide students with an assignment brief about precise topics, deadlines and feedback arrangements. (JISC, 2015)

It’s also essential to clearly articulate the marking criteria, learning outcomes and marking schemes to students. Remember YSJU have Generic Assessment Descriptors for undergraduate assessments, so any marking criteria should be mapped against these.

JISC (2015) highlight that providing this information can have the following benefits:

• Clarity for students about what is required for each assignment
• Clarity for students and staff about deadlines
• Ability to manage both staff and student workload
• Consistent and effective approach to feedback

Many staff in the Faculty of Health and Life Sciences create short videos about their assessments to disseminate this information. Please see the example below:

If this is something you would be interested in producing for your modules assessments in the future, please contact the TEL team: tel@yorksj.ac.uk.

Creating a Turnitin Assignment

There are a few things you should consider before you create a Turnitin assignment in Moodle. For example, do you want your student’s work to be stored in the Turnitin repository? When do you want the Originality Reports (covered in more detail in tomorrow’s post) to be generated? Do you want to allow draft and late submissions? And what sources in Turnitin’s repository (stored student papers, journals, Internet)  do you want it to match submitted papers against?

You also need to have a clear idea of the timescales for the assessment. You are required to set these when creating the assignment. You will need to specify the submission Start date (the date from which students can submit their assignment), the Due Date (the date/time the submission must be handed in before and the Post Date (the date in which students will automatically receive their feedback). The post date should be set to 15 working days after the due date, in line with the institution’s assessment and feedback policy.

The skill sheet and accompanying video below, will take you through the step-by-step process of creating a Turnitin assignment in Moodle.

Open this skills sheet for step-by-step guidance on how to create a Turnitin assignment.

Activity

Using the Skills Sheet above, create a Turnitin assignment in your assigned topic area within the 5 days of EMA and Turnitin Moodle course. 

Daniel

References

JISC. 2015. Transforming Assessment and Feedback: A stage of the Assessment and Feedback lifecycle. [Online]. [Accessed 30 November 2015]. Available from: https://www.jisc.ac.uk/guides/transforming-assessment-and-feedback/setting