Why should you download and archive from Turnitin?
When you delete a Turnitin Assignment (submission point), remove students from a Blackboard site or delete a whole Blackboard site, you will no longer be able to see either students’ work submitted to Turnitin, associated Similarity reports, any feedback you’ve written or marks entered.
It is therefore important to undertake the manual archiving of student work yearly to comply with the University’s retention schedule for documents related to examinations, validation and review, making work and information available should a student make a complaint or query their marks.
The schedule requires that a second copy of course work submitted by students is to be retained for six months after Board of Examiners approving the mark or grade. The schedule also requires that assessment feedback is retained for six months after the Board of Examiners making the award. In other words feedback and marks need to be kept for the time the student is studying at CCCU plus six months after the Exam Board which awards their degree or other award.
You may also want to download work or other information because:
- work is only submitted electronically and you are required to retain copies for audit
- you want to show a selection of work and/or feedback to external examiners offline
- you want to make a permanent copy of a Similarity report as supporting evidence for a plagiarism panel
Please ensure that you:
- advise students before you delete a Turnitin assignment, or remove them from your Blackboard site, and advise them to first download their full online receipts, Similarity reports and/or feedback.
- are aware of the programme’s procedure and location for archiving.
Contact your Digital Academic Developer for further guidance on how to share downloaded work with external examiners.
Where to save downloads from Turnitin
Disk space has been provided on Faculty and Academic Administration Team shared drives for the purpose of archiving from Turnitin. Check with your programme director and/or programme administrator for exact location of the folder/s you should save downloads to. You must be familiar with the following conditions of use for using folders on shared drives for Electronic Assignment Management (EAM) to ensure data can be located if needed and removed when no longer required:
- A structured storage framework must be adhered to. A folder named EAM Archive must be set up at programme-level or higher. Submitted work and feedback will be downloaded to this folder only once created. Organisation of files within this folder can be determined locally.
- Work and feedback will be downloaded into ZIP files wherever possible to maximise use of storage space.
- Filenames must include the expiry date as must any sub-folders in the format: ‘EXPIRES DDMMYY’ (in accordance with University document retention requirements).
- The shared drive owner has responsibility for ensuring files are removed once their expiry date is reached. This may be actioned by various roles including School or programme administrators, module leaders or Faculty Academic Administration Teams, to be determined locally.
- Each shared drive owner has responsibility for EAM Archive folders on their drive and will be the point of contact with IT.
- Permissions management on EAM archive folders will match those already in place on existing shared drives. Should Faculties/Schools/Faculty Academic Administration Teams need to add permissions beyond these, it can only be done at the top-level of shared drives and only through discussion with IT.
Contact the owner of the shared drive for more information. Contact the IT Service Point for technical support.
Always check downloaded work from Turnitin
Downloads can be interrupted or the contents corrupted. This is particularly true with large ZIP files which can take a while to download, such as those from Turnitin.
Before archiving them, always check the contents of ZIP files downloaded from Turnitin to ensure all required information was downloaded.