The following is a quote from Turnitin:
“As part of Turnitin’s commitment to providing the best customer experience and helping you get the most out of our solutions, we will be retiring the Blackboard Basic and Blackboard Direct Building Blocks at the end of the next academic year (end August 2022/end January 2023). Along with Blackboard’s current strategy to end support for all Building Blocks over the next couple years, this allows us to shift focus on providing a unified LTI 1.3 integration option with access to all Turnitin Feedback Studio features, and without the requirement for institutions to regularly upgrade their experience.”
What does that mean?
An “Integration” is a way that other service providers can integrate with Blackboard, this allows us to provide services not created by Blackboard to our staff and students from within the Blackboard environment. Not only is this good because users need only go to one location, they also don’t need to remember lots of different usernames and passwords.
“building block” and “Lti” are technologies that allow third party vendors to develop integrations for Blackboard.
Building blocks are old now, and as Blackboard modernises and evolves the technology of a building block is not able to keep up.
An LTi is a more modern integration technology that can evolve along with Blackboard. It keeps all of the same benefits to the users but allows updates and changes to occur more frequently.
Blackboard is removing all support for Building blocks in the next few years.
What does that mean to us?
How we interact with Turnitin (Tii) via the integration with Blackboard is going to look a bit different and your current workflows will need to be amended. For the most part the changes are positive, the interface is cleaner and more modern and there are a couple of needed feature improvements when viewing the “inbox” (list of submission) of an assignment. But we do lose the Course Management menu item named “Turnitin Assignments” which, when selected, showed you a list of all the Tii assignments of the course, you will now need to find the location where the assignment was posted for the students and you will need to hide the column in the gradecenter when you create a new assignment
Key Differences
The option to create LTI assignments in Blackboard courses has moved.
- The link to create new assignments is no longer found in the “Assessments” menu, the new LTI is located in the “Build Content” menu
- New LTI assignments are not shown in the Course Management menu item “Turnitin Assignments” to access them you need to locate them in the content area where they were created. The “Turnitin Assignments” menu item will be removed when the building block is no longer available.
- Creating an LTI assignment guide
HIDING THE COLUMN in grade center.
- HIDING THE COLUMN in grade center – This one is important. After you have created a new non-anonymous assignment you must HIDE THE COLUMN that is created in the Gradecentre. If you do not students will be able to see the grades as you add them. When the feedback/post date passes you must manually unhide the column for student to be able to view their marks and feedback.
- How to hide a column in the Grade Center
Email receipts are no longer sent to students following their submission.
- Email Receipts: Email submission receipts are not currently supported with Turnitin Feedback Studio LTI integrations, however following a submission students are presented with a banner within their assignment dashboard that provides a link to download a submission receipt. They can also access their assignment dashboard at any time to download a copy of the submission receipt using the receipt icon.
Will instructors lose access to PeerMark?
- Peer Mark: Instructors will continue to have access to PeerMark via the LTI integration, however, a gradebook column will not be created in the Blackboard Grade Center student’s PeerMark scores.
How does Anonymous Marking work with the LTI integration?
- When anonymous marking is enabled for an assignment, instructors will see the student names hidden within the LTI assignment inbox and within the document viewer. To prevent the author’s identities from being known within Blackboard, only a submission status is provided to Blackboard until the point at which the feedback release date has passed in Turnitin. At this time, names will become visible to instructors and grades will be passed to Blackboard. If an instructor needs to reveal the identity of a student before the feedback release date, it is possible to individually unhide a student’s name. It is not possible to disable and re-enable anonymous marking on an assignment, and currently, it is only possible to unhide students individually.
Can I rollover from Building Blocks to LTI?
- No, if you used to roll over your Turnitin assignments you will need to re-create them for the 2022-23 year. You cant roll over from a building block into an LTI. You will be able to roll over from an LTI to an LTI