Jennifer Waters, MCC English faculty and experienced Turnitin.com user shared her enthusiasm for Turnitin.com. This service has been purchased by Mesa Community College and is available to all MCC faculty. In case you were wondering, Turnitin is WebCT compatible.

Turnitin.com has a range of options, but the primary tool is the Plagiarism Prevention component. This is a text-matching program that matches papers your students upload with papers in a massive database. The database contains billions of pages from current and archieved Internet sources, student papers previously submitted to Turnitin.com, and commercial databases of published journal articles and periodicals. You can direct Turnitin.com to exclude bibliographies and text that has been put in quotations and material created by the same author ( e.g. your student).

The instructor receives a report that shows the percentage of the student's text that matches another text (a direct source comparison). The identical text is highlighted and the instructor can then decide whether or not the duplicity is significant.

Details on how to set up your Turnitin.com account are available on the CTL homepage ( http://ctl.mc.maricopa.edu) under the Quick Links list on the left side of the window. This resource also provides links to a multitude of resources developed by Turnitin.com on how to get started, what students need to read to upload their paper, etc. Jennifer highly recommends the Turnitin.com resources for both you and your students. With them in hand, it's relatively easy to get Turnitin.com working for your classes. However, if you have questions, feel free to contact Jennifer ( jbwaters@mail.mc.maricopa.edu) or Jonelle Moore ( jonelle.moore@mcmail.maricopa.edu).

Classroom Assessment Techniques (CATs) in a Learning Management System (LMS, such as WebCT)

Shelley Rodrigo, English faculty and CTL instructional technologist, demonstrated how to use a Learning Management System (such as WebCT) for adapting Classroom Assessment Techniques (CAT's) to your online, hybrid, or on-campus classes. CAT's are formative assessment measures that help instructors assess a variety of elements in their classrooms so that they can revise the course accordingly. Most CAT's fall into one of three areas:

Course-related Knowledge and Skills

Learner attitudes, Values and Self-Awareness

Learner Reactions to Instructions

Once the assessment has been created in WebCT as a survey, responses are anonymous (however WebCT will let you know which students have completed the survey if you wish to give them credit for their effort).

CATs in Online Surveys

Many CATS require considerable time and effort to create and administer. If you build the CAT into your WebCT class, you can copy it into future classes. WebCT has the basic data analysis tools to analyze your results. If desired, you can share the results with your students. Suggested CATS that would work well as a WebCT survey include:

Background Knowledge Probe
Reading Rating Sheets
Course-Related Self-Confidence Surveys
Misconception/Preconception Check

CATs in other Assessments

WebCT can be used as an easy place to collect, analyze, and report out data on CATs such as:

Approximate Analogies
One-Sentence Summary
Minute Paper
Muddiest Point

CATs in Discussion Boards

CATs don't have to be anonymous. They can serve as formative assessments to help you better develop the course as well as learning tools to help students learn the material, or about themselves as learners. If you want students to track themselves over time, WebCT can help them organize their work all in one place. This might be useful for:

Process Analysis
Productive Study-Time Logs
Focused Autobiographical Sketches

Other Resources

Patricia Cross and Tom Angelos's classic book, Classroom assessment techniques: A handbook for college teachers (2nd ed.). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, is available for check-out in the CTL library.

Shelley also recommends the following:

Online Cats by Terry Morris: http://terrymorris.net/cats/index.htm
Lansing CC http://www.lcc.edu/~cte/resources/teachingettes/classroomassessment.html
Mary Barone Martin http://www.mtsu.edu/~itconf/proceed99/Martin.htm
Southern Illinois University http://www.siue.edu/~deder/assess/catmain.html