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Deterring
Plagiarism in an Online Course Professor David Hennessy, in his fully online American Literature-Colonial to 1900 (AML 2010) course, has championed the use of a product called Turnitin, an Internet-based plagiarism detection service, to deter and detect plagiarized papers. The software is available free of charge for any BCC faculty member and is part of a ""Powerlink" within their Blackboard course shell. Professor Hennessy has an excellent organization schema set up for students. Instead of students submitting their paper assignments through the traditional Assignment Link in Course Tools. Students access the assignments form a folder on the Course Home Page:
The submission process allows the student to upload the paper in a manner very similar to the process they would normally use in their Blackboard/WebCT course shell. This interface allows the Turnitin software to review the paper for possible plagiarism:
After the paper has been reviewed by Turnitin, Professor Hennessy can view a report which red flags portions of the paper as being plagiarized.
Professor Hennessy says that it takes about 10 minutes to set up Turnitin for his courses through a WebCT Powerlink. Does it work? He states: "Before I started using Turnitin, I was receiving from students about 3 plagiarized papers per class. Now that I am using Turnitin, I have about 3 plagiarized papers per term." And just as important as the service that Turnitin provides, Professor Hennessy says that Turnitin acts as a major deterrent just because it is there. For more information about Turnitin, contact Professor David Hennessy at x6293 or email him at dhenness@broward.edu Instructional
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