D2L Brightspace 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 D2L Brightspace. Before we continue, please be aware that there are two Turnitin integrations available for D2L Brightspace: the most commonly used V2 custom integration that D2L Brightspace has developed with Turnitin (which integrates Turnitin's Feedback Studio directly into the D2L assignment workflow) and the LTI integration (accessed via Content for those instructors that want to use Turnitin's PeerMark workflow in their courses). You may or may not have both integrations enabled in your D2L Brightspace environment. Please check with your D2L Brightspace admin to verify which integration(s) you have enabled.

Should you find that you have the LTI 1.1 integration enabled, as you may recall, D2L Brightspace has communicated repeatedly to its clients its commitment to supporting LTI 1.3 tools and their desire for users to upgrade to an LTI 1.3 integration for external tools sooner rather than later. Because of this, we have worked with D2L Brightspace to make available an LTI 1.3 integration to replace the LTI 1.1 one for the PeerMark workflow. To be clear, these migration recommendations and upcoming communications apply to upgrading the LTI 1.1 integration to LTI 1.3 only, they do not apply to the V2 integration.

There are some things that you may want to consider when moving from LTI 1.1 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:

  1. SOC 2 audit report (available upon request)

  2. Voluntary Product Accessibility Template (VPAT)

  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 D2L Brightspace 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:

  1. If you have one, in your D2L Brightspace test or staging environment, check to see which Turnitin account is connected to your LTI 1.1 integration. We do not recommend using the same Turnitin account id for test or staging and production environments.

  2. If the same account has been used for the LTI 1.1 integration in your test or staging and production environment, log in to turnitin.com (or turnitinuk.com) and set up a new subaccount for the LTI 1.3 integration specifically for your test or staging environment.

  3. Complete the LTI 1.3 integration in your test or staging environment. If you have used a different Turnitin account for an LTI 1.1 integration in your test environment and did not need to set up a new Turnitin account ID, be sure to enable Auto Migrate Links for your LTI 1.3 deployment. The steps for integrating LTI 1.3 in test or staging are the same as those for installing it in production.

  4. If you have LTI 1.1 integrated in your test environment, you can hide the LTI 1.1 link to prevent confusion while testing. There is no need to delete that integration.

  5. 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.

  6. Submit to the assignments as a student (you can use Test Student for this).

  7. If you have used the same account id for an LTI 1.1 integration in test as you did in production, you will not be able to test accessing past LTI 1.1 assignments. This testing needs to occur in production as you need to use the same Turnitin account id for the LTI 1.3 integration that was used for the LTI 1.1 integration to view them. This testing can be done at the course level if that is your preference. If you have used a different account id for an LTI 1.1 integration in test than you did in production, you will be able to test accessing past LTI 1.1 assignments. You will also be able to test converting past LTI 1.1 assignments to new LTI 1.3 assignments when those previous LTI 1.1 assignments are copied into a new course.

  8. Once the LTI 1.3 integration is complete, go to External Learning Tools, Manage Tool Links (Legacy), and delete the LTI 1.1 tool link so that no new LTI 1.1 assignments can be created, but leave the Tool itself available to users so that they can access past LTI 1.1 assignments.

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 (including what do 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 guides
  2. Student guides
  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 D2L Brightspace 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?

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

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

  4. What happens to assignments in past courses? Do we still have access to them though D2L Brightspace?

  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&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