Max Watson, an assistant professor at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies (HUFS) in Seoul, is fast in adopting new technologies to improve his teaching and his students’ learning experiences. He first became aware of Turnitin during graduate school when his professors utilized it in class; as soon as he could, Max started using it with his own students at HUFS. He became an especially big fan of it after one particular semester when Feedback Studio alerted him to a very sophisticated plagiarism situation, where a student in his class had rephrased their entire paper for someone else to submit.
“I think it’s important to ensure that students are doing their own work, and therefore are graded correctly. By highlighting mistakes in paraphrasing and quoting, which the students can then revise and resubmit to see how they have improved, Turnitin has been greatly helpful in reinforcing a sense of academic integrity in my students and their overall writing skills. [In the sophisticated plagiarism situation I encountered], only a machine could have caught the slight remaining traces of the original paper, not humans.”
As an advocate for academic integrity and an ambassador for effective educational technology, he has had a chance to look back on his experiences with Turnitin with the 2018 Global Innovator Award. As an educator, Max is honored to be the recipient of this year’s award, which has inspired him to reflect on the many things that Turnitin Feedback Studio (TFS) provides.
His favorite feature, besides Originality Reports, is PeerMark, as it allows effortless assigning and grading of peer reviews. Max enables the option in PeerMark that allows students to choose one other submission to review, so students know that the progress of their work will be read and commented on by another person. This encourages peer feedback in writing classes, as well as in debate courses, ensuring that outlines get shared between opponents before their debate rounds. By enabling this feature, Max feels that PeerMark fosters motivation and self-satisfaction in writing, making his courses very student-centered.
As a 2018 Global Innovator, Max plans to continue to promote academic integrity by sharing his experiences with Turnitin to help his students produce original work, become stronger writers, and to ensure that his class remains dynamic and student-centered.
“Teaching citation skills and paraphrasing and giving [students] enough chances and resources, such as teacher feedback, peer feedback, and E-rater results, will help them to fix their missing citations and poor paraphrases. This will lead to higher quality papers with better sources. It’s quite important.”
Interested in reading more? Check out all of the 2018 Global Innovator stories here!