{"id":1045,"date":"2015-10-26T14:24:45","date_gmt":"2015-10-26T14:24:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/eltt\/?p=1045"},"modified":"2022-04-13T15:46:56","modified_gmt":"2022-04-13T15:46:56","slug":"turnitin-conference-2015-london","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.cardiff.ac.uk\/LTAcademy\/turnitin-conference-2015-london\/","title":{"rendered":"Turnitin Conference 2015 (London)"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Dewi Parry<\/a><\/p>\n

\"photo<\/a><\/p>\n

This is the first and last time I\u2019m going to mention getting up at 5.45am to go to a conference! Apart from that, it was great to go down to Westminster again, and to the QEII Centre for this year\u2019s Turnitin Conference. If you have a twitter account, you can follow the tweet progress of the conference using #tii2015<\/a>.<\/p>\n

As I\u2019m well aware when you go to these things, one of the common phrases that are churned out regularly is \u201cit\u2019s on the roadmap\u201d. This means that for the most part, common problems – those things that niggle at us every day, are being looked at and\u00a0improved – and they are always more complicated than we could ever imagine!<\/p>\n

One further phrase that was used quite heavily during the conference was \u201cTechnical Deficit\u201d, which means that the company are having to completely re-structure their back end operations in order to expand. This is some thing that Will Murray (Chief Product Officer) was keen to stress – going forward they would have to technically overhaul.<\/p>\n

Moving on to the product itself, the figures are mind boggling. The database behind the system lists 57 billion web pages (with a new deeper crawler on way), 143 million STM journals and contains 570 million essays. 26 million students are now enrolled on the system, and the Turnitin student essays database increases by 130 million new papers every year.<\/p>\n

Currently there are 3 different versions of Turnitin for Blackboard, Basic, Direct, and Direct 2.5. The company\u2019s roadmap for development is to have one version \u201cNext\u201d in the future, developed through using LTI (Learning Tools Interoperability<\/a>). Turnitin advised self hosted Blackboard institutions who are thinking of moving to hosted to get in touch with them to iron out problems. The move from their .ac.uk URL over to .com has also kicked up some problems.<\/p>\n

As the Turnitin staff mentioned themselves, they are aware of their problems with support and communications, a problem many institutions, not just ours, have with the company. Apparently, there is a massive reorganisation of Turnitin support (better routing for support calls for staff on way, and human responses as opposed to generic electronic responses), where we will hope to see results of this from January 2016. Embedded help and support are apparently coming to Blackboard and Moodle, and more account manager site visits – which is a welcomed improvement from the current Turnitin support model, which is problematic.<\/p>\n

So, a roundup of up and coming improvements and developments (I\u2019m not putting dates against these, as they didn\u2019t):<\/p>\n