turnitin

1. Make sure you are using the latest version of the Building Block for your version of Blackboard (at least version 2.1.4 or later).
2. Restart your Blackboard server and check again
3. If the problem persists or happens intermittently, search your Blackboard server(s) for the saaj.jar file. If you find any instances of the saaj.jar file in any of the other building block directories, you can take the following action
1. You can request from the vendor of that building block a version that has the saaj.jar file removed
2. You can manually remove the saaj.jar file from your server (we do not guarantee that the building block will continue to function normally, but it normally does); restart your server.
4. If problems continue to persist, contact our Helpdesk.

Basically, what is happening is that the student is submitting a paper, and it is being received by Turnitin, but when Turnitin tries to make a web service call back into Blackboard to indicate in Blackboard that the student has submitted, the web service call fails, and the student receives the error message: "The paper was submitted successfully to Turnitin, but the Blackboard Gradebook was not modified. The Blackboard Gradebook does not currently reflect his assignment's submission status." That means there is no exclamation mark in the Blackboard Gradebook for the Turnitin Assignment for each student that has submitted a paper and received this error message.

The likely cause is that during the submission process, after the papers were received by Turnitin, there was an error that occurred in the web service call. What happens when a student submits to a Turnitin Assignment is that it is accepted by our system, and then a web service call is made from our Turnitin servers to the Blackboard servers to indicate in Blackboard that the student has submitted for this Turnitin Assignment, and particularly to have that exclamation mark appear in the Blackboard Gradebook. However, there are times when that web service call can fail for one reason or another, thus making it so that Turnitin has received the paper successfully by the indication in the Blackboard Gradebook could not be completed. This is a known issue for which happens intermittently for different institutions, and we have not been able to determine the cause or reproduce it on our own systems. We are looking for a way to reproduce this error consistently so that we can come up with a solution for it but have not been able to so far. Because the papers are still successfully received by Turnitin, instead of giving the user a large error screen when this occurs, we just give a notice that the paper was successfully received, but that the web service call failed.

There isn't a solution to this problem really, or a way to get that exclamation mark to appear in the Blackboard Gradebook. We are looking into a tool that will try to resend the web service call, but we’re not sure if this will work either. What you can try is having the instructor delete the submission and having the student try to submit again. If the error happens again for that student, please contact our Helpdesk.

One thing to check here is if there is a corresponding Gradebook column for this Turnitin Assignment, and that Gradebook column needs to have the same title as the Turnitin Assignment. If the Gradebook column is missing or the title is different (e.g., abbreviated, etc.) this will cause the errors to occur.

Turnitin Assignments that were created in Blackboard using the Turnitin building block 2.0.5 or higher can be copied using any of the three options that appear when you select the "Course Copy" feature in the "Course Options" area in the "Control Panel". However, if either "Copy Course Materials into a New Course" or "Copy Course Materials into an Existing Course" is chosen, you must be certain to select the content area that contains the Turnitin Assignment you would like to copy as well as the corresponding "Gradebook Items and Settings" to ensure that the copy succeeds.

No other method of copying an assignment, including the use of the "Copy" button that appears next to the content item, is supported. Copying a Turnitin Assignment is unlikely to work with any method other than the three mentioned above.

Turnitin Assignments created in Blackboard using any Turnitin building block that was created before the 2.0.5 building block cannot be copied by any means.

A known issue is that students are unable to access feedback that has been uploaded by instructors prior to the upgrade. When students view Turnitin Assignments in My Grades, the grade they have been given is not clickable, so they cannot view the additional files that have been uploaded

This is the known issue with Blackboard 8 and our Turnitin Building Block. Blackboard has said that it will be addressed in Service Pack 4 for Blackboard 8, but we have not been informed as to when that will be released. The way Blackboard has implemented changes to their gradebook, "comments" that have been made by the instructor should be viewable there, but "attached files" are not accessible.

For the Turnitin Building Block to work correctly, the Blackboard server needs to be able to make outgoing HTTP/HTTPS connections as well as receive incoming HTTP/HTTPS connections. One the outgoing connections, the Blackboard server is going to be trying to make connections to api.turnitin.com over the standard HTTP or HTTPS ports.

Also, your Blackboard server needs to be able to receive incoming connections from our Turnitin servers. If you have a firewall in place that is not allowing outside connections to your Blackboard server, please check this. For your Blackboard servers, the ports 80 and 443 need to be accessible from our range of IP addresses, which is 208.57.158.0/24 (note, this is different from the IP address you might get when your servers try to connect to our servers).

To download the update for the Turnitin Building Block, your Turnitin account administrator would need to follow these steps:

1. Login in to Turnitin at www.turnitin.com (make sure that you are in as the administrator user type)
2. Click on edit button (“gear” icon) for the account that has purchased the Turnitin Building Block
3. Click on the "add/modify API integration information" link near the bottom of the page
4. Click on the link to download the Turnitin Building Block

The reason the problem is happening is because our Building Block uses web services for some of the advanced functionality, and the page that our Turnitin servers are trying to access when calling the web services is being blocked or receiving a request to log in because you are using Windows IIS/Active Directory authentication. The quickest and best way to solve the problem would be to open up the folder in IIS and remove the security on the folder. The folder should have a path like "blackboard/content/vi/bb_bb60/plugins/turn-plgnhndl/webapp" or something similar to that. It is the folder that is created when the Building Block is installed and where all the building block files live.

No, we do not grab users' Blackboard passwords. We do store their usernames as a part of the verification process, but we do not get their passwords. The main pieces of information that we use are the user's Blackboard email address and the unique ID that gets assigned to each user within Blackboard. Because a user is logged in to Blackboard, we assume that they have already been authenticated.