On Thursday 27th September I attended the Turnitin Summit, held at the impressive Sage Gateshead.

Tyne Bridge and Sage Gateshead

This event was eagerly anticipated by many of us working in the area of electronic management of assessment (EMA) in UK HE, as Turnitin were to demo their new advanced marking functionality.  Having been previously involved in some product development sessions with colleagues from Turnitin I had some idea of what we could expect, but it was great to see a live demo showing what has been built.

The new version has many much-needed features, including improved support for sharing marking between multiple markers, double and double blind marking, and also an option to allow release of feedback prior to release of marks.  Sector beta testing is due to take place in Q1 and Q2 2019, with general availability scheduled for Q3.

As Bill Loller, VP for Product Management, mentioned when introducing the demo, this development is a real testament to some excellent partnership working between the company and UK clients, which, on the evidence of the day, will deliver some really tangible benefits for us.

Another area of EMA which Turnitin are working on is support for moderation and I attended a useful session later on where we were able to feed in to this development.

I was also interested to hear Marc Daubach, Chief Revenue Officer & SVP Customer Success, mention Turnitin’s recent acquisition of Gradescope, a company which have been developing solutions incorporating AI-assisted marking.

Although my main focus for the day was assessment, there were also updates on the new “Authorship Investigation” product, designed to address contract cheating, and the “Code Investigate” tool, which checks similarity of software source code, currently in development.