Introduction

Note: The plagiarism control is an additional module and is not available on all sites. For more information or to place orders, contact your local itslearning office.

Plagiarism is the act of appropriating the literary composition of another author, or excerpts, ideas or passages, and passing the material off as one's own creation without quoting sources. In short: literary or artistic theft.

Searching for plagiarizers is both difficult and time-consuming. Preventing plagiarism manually is close to impossible. itslearning's integrated plagiarism technology is a powerful tool that checks text material submitted through itslearning and compares it to countless other texts.

If itslearning finds a match, the teacher is alerted. It also has a preventative effect, since you can dissuade learners from plagiarising simply by letting them know that the feature is available.

itslearning compares submitted material to texts on the Internet, within your organisation or on reference sites. In the following, we introduce some of the problems related to plagiarism today and give you some guidelines on how to use itslearning's plagiarism control.

Where do plagiarizers find material?

In today's digital society it is easy for learners to find texts to plagiarize. These texts can be from the Internet, publishers or other digital content providers, or from other assignments submitted at the same educational institution.

The Internet is flooded with easily-obtainable texts of which learners can take advantage in school assignments simply by using the copy and paste method. There are a great number of known "paper mills" on the Internet where finished papers and documents are readily available. Such sites are particularly suited to plagiarism.

How can itslearning prevent plagiarism?

We use the renowned Ephorus plagiarism control technology, which is integrated into itslearning. The plagiarism control uncovers suspect assignments and reports back to the teacher. To activate plagiarism control, the teacher only has to check a single box when adding the assignment. When the report from plagiarism control arrives, the teacher has to decide whether this is truly a case of plagiarism, whether a learner has not quoted a text properly, or the two different texts simply happen to coincide. For teachers, all the manual work involved in sifting through texts to find similarities is removed, leaving them with just the decision-making part of the process.

How does the plagiarism control work?

When a learner turns in the assignment, it is automatically sent to both the teacher and plagiarism control through itslearning. The teacher receives the learner’s text right away. The response time from the plagiarism control may vary from a few seconds to 24 hours depending on the amount of traffic in the plagiarism control. The plagiarism control checks all submitted material for plagiarism. Once the scan is completed, itslearning notifies the teacher. Closed

Please see the screenshot.

Privacy

It is possible to restrict the material submitted by one specific customer from being shown to other users. Each customer has a private index. By default, the customer has to grant other customers in the Ephorus system access to their files for cross-checking for plagiarism. Customers can be deleted from the Ephorus system if a written request is sent to Ephorus, or automatically when the customer agreement with Ephorus is terminated.