Assessment step with external tools - Turnitin

Overview

To build a new assessment step into ORA problems that sends the learner submission to an external tool (Turnitin) and displays the results in the ORA problem interface.

Context

Turnitin is an online plagiarism detection and academic integrity tool widely used in education. It helps educators and institutions ensure the originality of students' work by comparing submitted assignments, papers, or content against a vast database of academic and internet sources. Turnitin produces a similarity reports, where it highlights potential instances of plagiarism, enabling instructors to uphold academic honesty and guide students in proper citation practices, fostering a culture of integrity and originality in academic writing.

Problem

ORA2 submissions and open responses in general can be subject to plagiarism or similarity issues. Learners can copy and paste content from the internet and try to make it pass as their own, or collude with other learners to send basically the same work under 2 different names. This is a tough problem to solve and there are specialized tools such as turnitin that deal with this challenge.
We aim to build a robust mechanism to incorporate automated assessment steps that are powered by external tools. this would potentially have other uses in the future for example with ai assesment tools.

Use cases:

As an instructor/learner, I need to be able to assess whether the learner submission complies with the requirements against plagiarism in order to ensure I provide a fair grade.
As a learner I submitted my work and I want to be able to access the similarity report produced by turnitin in order to improve my writing skills, by looking at the citation error I may have made or by looking at the annotations made by the instructor in my document.

Proposed solution:

The Unidigital project (Spanish universities consortium) is interested and motivated to contribute an integration beetween open edX (ORA-2 in particular) and turnitin that would allow these things to happen:

That open edx holds the turnitin Core API credentials either as a setting inside the ORA component or as a setting in the course.
That the files submitted by a learner to the ORA problem can be made available to be sent to turnitin
That said file(s) are sent to turnitin for review and any immediate response from the turintin API is handled appropriately. for example if the credentials are not correct, there is a timeout, the file is rejected, etc.
That when the request is accepted by turnitin, and while turnitin has not provided a similarity reports, an indication is shown to learners and instructors in the open edX side
That when turnitin provides a response, the link to the viewer of the corresponding similarity report can be seen in the open edX UI for learners and instructors.

The current proposed approach is to build a turnitin assessment step into the ORA workflow.

Other approaches considered:

A different approach we considered was to minimize the interventions to ORA by:

making the learner submitted files available via an open edX event, so that an extension component (a turnitin plugin) could take them and send them to turnitin for processing.
Building an extension point (an open edX filter) to be added to ORA that would allow us to display the response we get from turnitin to the learner and the instructor

Such initial proposal was explored here

Competitive research:

How do Canvas/Moodle/Coursera solve this problem?

TBD

Proposed plan for any relevant usability/UX testing

TBD

Plan for long-term ownership/maintainership

edunext is commited to build and contribute this work as part of the unidigital (spanish government) project. As part of that commitment, edunext would commit to maintain the feature for a minimum of 2 years and after that, either find a suitable maintainer to hand it over to, or to follow a the deprecation procedure in case the feature has any inconvenience or its maintenance is a burden that no one can carry.

Open questions for rollout/releases

TBD