Focusing on Feedback: Goodbye Turnitin and Hello to Feedback Studio

Let’s be honest – marking is rarely fun. Grading papers when the latest episode of Game of Thrones is on, or your four-year-old wants to play trains is simply not attractive. So any tool that helps to make the process easier is always going to be welcome.

Turnitin has long been a part of the marking tool kit, automating some of the burden of trying to identify plagiarism. Students and teachers are very familiar with scanning through writing for highlighted similarities that have been matched to other works. It’s such a common platform that it is sometimes verbified: ‘Did you Turnitin?

A newly released upgrade from Turnitin signals that the platform is widening its scope beyond plagiarism detection to facilitating teacher feedback more broadly. This is a welcome new direction for teachers, since providing effective feedback is one of the most important parts of the teaching process.

This new release is called ‘Feedback Studio’ and it will be available for all Navitas colleges from 1st August 2017. Feedback Studio uses all the classic Turnitin features but makes them much easier and faster to use. These include:

  • the originality report
  • rubric scorecards
  • grading forms
  • text comments
  • voice comments

The most obvious difference in Feedback Studio is in its layout. The format is more logical and functional. For example, you don’t have to switch between the marking and similarity report pages. You can also simply highlight the text you want to respond to, and then select the type of response you want to make: a pre-defined comment, strike-through of the text, or adding a comment of your own.

A very clean, new interface. (Image: Turnitin)

To tour or play with the new Feedback Studio, visit Turnitin’s demo page.

Please get in touch if you have Feedback Studio tips to share or join the conversation with Meg James in the Moodle Users Group in Yammer.

Rubrics on your mind? Check out Ann Wilson’s overview of assessment rubrics and how to make your own rubrics in this post, or dive deeper in the next FoLTO ‘Assessment, Marking & Feedback’ online course.