Turnitin released winners of the 2017 Global Innovation Awards, which recognizes educators, technology administrators, and institutions that are innovative and exemplary in their commitment to the principles of academic integrity. Turnitin commended the honorees for their proactive efforts to encourage and promote the respect of intellectual property in writing. Click to Tweet.
This year’s overall Global Innovator is Croydon College, London and its E-learning manager Andrew Checkley for rapid, boundary-pushing adoption of Turnitin’s services despite limited staff and financial resources. Working with the Moodle Virtual Learning Environment, Checkley created custom scripts and plugins for Turnitin to log individual student actions and progress, identify crunch times for staff, and automate grading imports. These technical innovations have helped Croydon College keep pace with nearly 40,000 annual online submissions into Turnitin yet still enhance outcomes for students as they move onto higher education and the workplace.
Along with Croydon College and Checkley, 20 other winning educators and institutions from Tbilisi, Georgia; the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates; Australia; Asia; Latin America; India; Africa; and the United States were recognized by Turnitin. “In this year’s Global Innovation Awards, there was a common theme among the applicants about proactive education and developing respect for intellectual property, said Chris Caren, Turnitin CEO. “It was particularly gratifying to see how our higher and secondary education systems around the globe are putting a spotlight on technology’s role in improving writing while also teaching students how to respect and properly cite another individual’s work to develop academic integrity.”
There were 678 nominations from 73 countries in this year’s awards, which eclipsed previous year’s by a substantial margin. An international panel of academics and previous finalists picked this year’s winners from each of the seven global regions in the categories of Writing with Integrity, Moving Forward with Integrity, or Partners in Success. An overall Global Innovator and runner-up who have gone above and beyond were selected from the finalists. In its three-year history, the Global Innovation Awards have recognized over 120 individuals and learning institutions for outstanding efforts and contributions to education.
See the Global Innovation Awards webpage for individual stories and a full award list, including Honorable Mentions.