Moodle migration recommendations for Turnitin admins

As the Turnitin admin, we will be communicating with you periodically over the next year regarding best practices for moving from the LTI 1.1 integration to the LTI 1.3 integration in Moodle. Before we continue, please be aware that there are several Turnitin integrations available for Moodle for Feedback studio customers: Plagiarism Plugin, Direct V2, LTI 1.1, and LTI 1.3. You may have multiple integrations enabled in your Moodle environment. As such, please check with your Moodle admin to verify which integration(s) you have enabled.

Should you find that you have the LTI 1.1 integration enabled, please be aware that the industry standard is moving to LTI 1.3 and your IT Department may want to move to the LTI 1.3 standard sooner rather than later. To be clear, these migration recommendations and upcoming communications apply to upgrading the LTI 1.1 integration to LTI 1.3 only, they do not apply to the other integrations.

There are some things that you may want to consider when moving from LTI 1.1 to LTI 1.3. It is important to remember that no end of life date has been announced currently so your institution will be able to create a personalized timeline that works best for your institutional review requirements and academic terms.

What we are asking of you is assistance in preparing your institution for this anticipated change when you are ready. In the following pages, we have outlined best practices and provided supporting documentation to facilitate the internal conversations (testing, rollout, providing support, etc.) you may need to have at your institution before enacting that change.

There are two aspects to this change that you may want to consider - one which addresses the technological part of the change and one that addresses the policy part of the change.

Here is an example of a recommended workflow.

Stage 1: Vetting

You may have a Cybersecurity or IT department that would like to vet the LTI 1.3 integration before deploying in production and also before you talk to any stakeholders or do anything else.

Therefore, you may need to contact them to see what they would need for this process and find out how long this might take (as this will affect your initial testing in your test or staging environment and also deployment for your production environment). Some documents they may want Turnitin to provide to them might include:

  1. SOC 2 audit report (available upon request)

  2. Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT)

  3. The most recent version of Turnitin's student privacy policy

Stage 2: Testing

Once the integration has been vetted (if required), if you are not a Moodle administrator, you may want to reach out to your support staff for a discussion on setting up and testing the LTI 1.3 integration in your test or staging environment (if you have one). If you are one administrator of several, you may want to speak to your fellow admins about this as well. In order to facilitate those discussions and the testing itself, we recommend the following:

  1. If you have one, in your Moodle test or staging environment, check to see which Turnitin account is connected to your LTI 1.1 integration. Then in production check to see which Turnitin account is connected there. We do not recommend using the same Turnitin account id for test or staging and production environments.

  2. If the same account has been used for the LTI 1.1 integration in your test or staging and production environment, log in to turnitin.com and set up a new subaccount for the LTI 1.3 integration specifically for your test or staging environment. If you never had Turnitin integrated in your test or staging environment, we still recommend you create a separate subaccount for testing.

  3. Complete the LTI 1.3 integration there following these directions.

  4. Create assignments. You may want to focus on workflows that reflect what your instructors will be doing in their own classes. You may also want to ask if there are any special use cases (and thus any unique workflows) that a department or instructor uses and test that as well.

  5. Submit to the assignments as a student (you can use Student Role for this).

  6. Because you need to use the same account id for your LTI 1.3 integration that was used for your LTI 1.1 integration to test how old LTI 1.1 assignments are accessed, we recommend testing this once you have installed the LTI 1.3 integration in your production environment. Please note that the directions for converting your existing LTI 1.1 integration to an LTI 1.3 integration are different and can be found here.

In addition, to assist in your testing you may find the following documentation helpful:

  1. LMS course copy recommendations

  2. Turnitin assignment copy tool

  3. Admin FAQs

Stage 3: Preparing

While Turnitin has support documentation available for you, your institution may want to develop their own support documentation. If this is the case, you may want to involve the Training Staff and/or instructional designers on staff for this. Here are some quick links to our help pages should you wish to use them for guidance:

  1. Instructor guide

  2. Student guide

  3. Instructor FAQs

Stage 4: Aligning Stakeholders

Once you have all your technical testing and documentation completed, you may want to involve various stakeholders to have discussions on when to implement LTI 1.3 and stop using LTI 1.1 in your Moodle environment. Some of those stakeholders could include:

  1. Department Heads

  2. Writing Center Department/Staff

  3. Instructional Design staff

  4. Academic Integrity Department/Staff

  5. Student Support Department/Staff

  6. Faculty Senate

  7. Library staff

  8. Others

Alternatively, depending on your institutional policy and procedures, you may be able to begin this step at the same time that the vetting and testing is going on.

Managing stakeholder expectations is important. This change will not be a major upheaval causing instructors to have to recreate all their assignments. The Admin FAQ that is provided to you lists all the gain of functionality and any potential loss of functionality that users might experience. This document will be very important in assisting with managing stakeholder expectations and providing answers to questions below that might be discussed in these talks.

In your discussions, you might want to consider the following questions:

  1. When is the best time in the school year to make a change?

  2. How do we communicate the changes to your instructors, instructional designers, and support staff?

  3. Because the workflow does not change for students in this move, do you need to communicate anything to them?

  4. What happens to assignments in past courses? Do we still have access to them though Moodle?

  5. What about record retention? Is any data going to be lost?

  6. What additional workload does this place on our instructors/staff and how do we support them in this?

  7. Do we need to have Q&A sessions to get user feedback?

  8. What resources do we need to have in place for students and instructors before we make the change?

Stage 5: Deploying

Please remember that Turnitin will provide a comprehensive list of resources to assist you in this transition including:

  1. Admin FAQs

  2. Instructor FAQs

  3. LMS Course Copy recommendations

  4. Turnitin Assignment Copy

  5. Integration guidance

  6. Admin help guides

  7. Instructor help guides

  8. Student help guides