Three separate plug-ins were developed to support the use of Turnitin within Moodle. These are Moodle Direct, Moodle Basic, and the Moodle Plagiarism API plug-in developed by Catalyst. There are advantages and disadvantages to using any one of the three legacy solutions. In Moodle Direct V2, The Turnitin team will provide a simplified solution which affords all of the advantages of the legacy solutions while avoiding the current disadvantages of each.

Moodle Direct

A custom contributed activity module that gives users a workflow / UI that is separate from the standard Moodle activities. Moodle Direct hooks into various Moodle features such as the GradeBook, groups and groupings, user enrollments / permissions, calendar and my Moodle screens. The concept behind Moodle Direct is to provide the Turnitin experience from within the Moodle environment.

Advantages:

• Provides a more Moodle-like experience for delivering Turnitin Originality Checking and GradeMark services

• Does not support full suite of Turnitin products including PeerMark, and Turnitin Rubric Manager
• Requires the use of a separate workflow to use Turnitin - Turnitin is treated as a unique assignment type in Moodle

Moodle Basic

A framed in 'shallow' integration that allows users to log into Turnitin from a standard (2.2) Moodle Assignment type via SSO (Single Sign On).

Advantages:

• Supports the full suite of tools available through Turnitin. This is achieved by 'single signing' users into the actual Turnitin product.

• Uses pseduo information for student user accounts in Turnitin; which can lead to licensing issues and user conflicts
• Does not support the Moodle 2.3+ assignment module type
• Embeds the Turnitin user interface into the Moodle user interface, resulting in a disjointed user experience
• Requires the use of a separate workflow to use Turnitin -Turnitin is treated as a unique assignment type in Moodle

Moodle Plagiarism API Plugin

A plagiarism plug in supported as a plug in from Moodle 2+ and as a patch in Moodle 1.9. The plug in tightly incorporates plagiarism functionality from Turnitin into a number of standard Moodle activities, most notably the assignment activity. This allows users to stay in the Moodle standard workflow and send author's work to the plagiarism detection service via the API using background scheduled tasks.

Advantages:

• Incorporates Turnitin into a number of standard Moodle activities, most notably the assignment activity

• Support and enhancements owned and managed outside of the Turnitin team

Turnitin utilizes the Moodle user primary keys to associate Turnitin users, courses and assignments in Blackboard. When migrating to a new version of Moodle, upgrading a Moodle server, or making any changes to the Moodle system which would result in deleting or changing existing user primary keys, you should backup your existing user primary keys for users, courses and assignments. This information is required by our support team to restore your previous data. Prior to upgrading your system, please contact Turnitin support.