Setting up Turinitin, part 2

A brief recap from friday.

• My first step was to create my administration account at the Turnitin site.

• My second step was to configure my Turnitin account.

• While configuring the account, I choose the Moodle Direct configuration, which resulted in the site providing the moodle plugin in the form of a download zip file.  I did not have to go to moodle plugins to get the file.  Turnitin provided it for me.  Nice.

• I unzipped the file and read the readme.txt file at the root of the unzipped folder and followed the typical moodle plugin steps for installing a plugin.  I copied the extracted folder to the root of the mod folder in my target instance. 

Unlike other plugins, this one required me to check my php.ini file to ensure that php.curl extension was active on the server, which is was.  The plugin also required me to add a configuration directive in the config.php file for the target instance.  This was the first moodle plugin that required me to do so.

Once moodle completed the plugin installation, I found the configuration form for the plugin in the Admin | Plugins | Activity Modules | Turnitin Assignment



The Account ID is located on the home page of the turnitin site, the shared key was created by me while setting up the account.

After clicking the Run Connectivity Test link, to ensure I have each side talking to the other, I see this



Today, I batched in 15 teachers using the Turnitin interface

• Upon creation of the instructor account, a email is sent to their specified account with a temporary password.  The instructors can follow the link in the email to verify their account and then update their password.

• I logged into moodle, choose a course and looked to see if I could edit existing assignments in the course and synch it up with Turnitin.  Upon first glance I did not see an option.  I added a new assignment and saw the Turnitin Assignment option.  I saved the assignment and saw it syching up moodle and Turnitin.

The resulting assignment in the course has the Turnitin logo next to it.


I went back to Turnitin to see how it looked on that side and could see the course name now listed with my teacher account.




So, things are synching and assigning.  Now we have to focus on getting the instructor to understand how to use this!  This setting almost implies that you can only synch with new assignments.  Note the term "Moodle Direct Turnitin Assignment".