Canvas migration recommendations for Turnitin admins

As the Turnitin admin, we will be communicating with you periodically over the next year regarding best practices for moving from the LTI 1.1 integration to the LTI 1.3 integration in Canvas. There are some things that you may want to consider in this journey. It is important to remember that your institution will be able to create a personalized timeline that works best for your institutional review requirements and term dates. As of now, there is not a hard deadline for moving over to the LTI 1.3 integration and the LTI 1.1 integration will continue to be supported by both Canvas and Turnitin in the foreseeable future.

Having said that, the industry standard is moving to LTI 1.3 and your IT Department may want to move all Canvas integrated tools to this standard sooner rather than later.

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 beta or test environments and also deployment for production). Some documents they may want Turnitin to provide to them might include:

  1. SOC 2 audit report (available upon request)

  2. Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT) (available upon request)

  3. 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 Canvas administrator, you may want to reach out to your Canvas support staff for a discussion on setting up and testing the LTI 1.3 integration in your test or beta environment. 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:

  1. Create a new Turnitin subaccount to test the LTI 1.3 integration.

  2. Complete the LTI 1.3 integration setup in beta or test.

  3. Create 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.

  4. Submit to the assignments as an enrolled student. Remember that Student View cannot be used with LTI 1.3 testing so you will need to impersonate an enrolled student (can be a dummy student) that has a corresponding email (does not have to be real).

  5. You may want to also test copying LTI 1.3 assignments into new courses. Unfortunately, in test/beta, you cannot access old LTI 1.1 assignments in past courses. They will launch instead as “new” LTI 1.3 assignments.

  6. For testing how old LTI 1.1 assignments are accessed via the LTI 1.3 integration, you can do that at the course level in your production environment. Once you have installed the LTI 1.3 integration in production, you can make it available at a course level. Be sure that your test course has previous LTI 1.1 assignments and submissions in it. When you are done testing how to access previous LTI 1.1 assignments and submissions, then you can remove it from the course and make it available to all your users.

  7. Remember that these environments update every 3 weeks (test) or every week (beta) so you may need to redo the integration if you are in the middle of testing.

In addition, to assist in your testing you may find the following documentation helpful:

  1. Course copy recommendations
  2. Turnitin Assignment Copy

  3. Admin FAQs (This includes what you need to do with the existing LTI 1.1 integration when you move to the LTI 1.3 integration.)

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:

  1. Instructor guide

  2. Student guide

  3. Instructor FAQs

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 LTI 1.1 in your Canvas environment. Some of those stakeholders could include:

  1. Department Heads

  2. Writing Center Department/Staff

  3. Instructional Design Staff

  4. Academic Integrity Department/Staff

  5. Student Support Department/Staff

  6. Faculty Senate

  7. Library Staff

  8. 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. This change will not be a major upheaval causing instructors to have to recreate all their assignments. The Admin 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.

In your discussions, you might want to consider the following questions:

  1. When is the best time in the school year to make a change? For example, changing the integration in the middle of a semester is not recommended as that will disrupt current courses and assignments.

  2. How do we communicate the changes to our instructors, instructional designers, and support staff?

  3. Because the workflow does not change for students in this move, do we need to communicate anything to them?

  4. What happens to assignments in past courses? Do we still have access to them though Canvas?

  5. What about record retention? Is any data going to be lost?

  6. What additional workload does this place on our instructors/staff and how do we support them in this?

  7. Do we open it to all or to just a few initially? Do we want to do a soft launch?

  8. Do we need to have Q and A sessions to get user feedback?

  9. 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:

  1. Admin FAQs

  2. Instructor FAQs

  3. Course copy recommendations

  4. Turnitin Assignment Copy

  5. Integration guidance

  6. Admin help guides

  7. Instructor help guides

  8. Student help guides