In this guide:
- Stage 1: Vetting
- Stage 2: Testing
- Stage 3: Preparing
- Stage 4: Aligning stakeholders
- Stage 5: Deploying
As the Turnitin admin, we will be communicating with you periodically over the next year regarding best practices for moving from the Moodle Direct V2 plugin to the LTI 1.3 integration. Before we continue, please be aware that there are four supported Turnitin integrations available for Moodle for Feedback Studio customers: Plagiarism Plugin, Direct V2 plugin, LTI 1.1, and LTI 1.3. Please refer to comparison chart of the integrations that we offer to our Moodle customers that use Feedback Studio for a quick review. 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 Moodle Direct V2 plugin 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 Moodle Direct V2 plugin 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 the Moodle Direct V2 plugin 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:
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SOC 2 audit report (available upon request)
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Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT)
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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:
- Because we do not recommend using the same Turnitin account id for test or staging and production environments, we recommend you log in to turnitin.com (or turnitinuk.com) and set up two new subaccounts for the LTI 1.3 integration - one for your test or staging environment (should you need to) and one for your production environment.
- For testing, complete the LTI 1.3 integration in your test or staging environment following our Configuring Feedback Studio in Moodle LTI 1.3 guidance. Be sure to link it to the correct Turnitin subaccount.
- Create LTI 1.3 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.
- Submit to the assignments as a student (you can use the student role for this).
- When you are ready to install the LTI 1.3 integration in production, follow the same Moodle LTI 1.3 configuration guidance and be sure to link to the correct Turnitin subaccount.
- Past Direct V2 plugin assignments can be “converted” for use in future courses using the Turnitin Assignment Copy tool. Once a Direct V2 plugin assignment is converted to an LTI 1.3 assignment, instructors can choose to use the LMS course copy recommendations or continue to use the Turnitin Assignment Copy tool for future courses.
- It may be that your institution would like to run the Direct V2 plugin and LTI 1.3 integration at the same time as you transition. When you are ready to move fully to the LTI 1.3 integration, be sure to uninstall the Direct V2 plugin from your Moodle environment. Going forward, accessing past Direct V2 plugin assignments can be done using the Paper Lookup tool (due to be released in Q1 2024).
In addition, to assist in your testing you may find the following documentation helpful:
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:
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 the Direct V2 plugin in your Moodle environment. Some of those stakeholders could include:
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Department Heads
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Writing Center Department/Staff
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Instructional Design staff
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Academic Integrity Department/Staff
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Student Support Department/Staff
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Faculty Senate
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Library staff
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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. The administrator migration 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. It is also important to understand and communicate that this change will cause instructors to have to “convert” their Direct V2 plugin assignments to LTI 1.3 assignments using the Assignment Copy tool.
In your discussions, you might want to consider the following questions:
- When is the best time in the school year to make a change?
- How do we communicate the changes to your instructors, instructional designers, and support staff?
- Because the workflow does not change for students in this move, do you need to communicate anything to them?
- What happens to assignments in past courses? Do we still have access to them though Moodle?
- What about record retention? Is any data going to be lost?
- What additional workload does this place on our instructors/staff and how do we support them in this?
- Do we need to have Q&A sessions to get user feedback?
- 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: