ActiveClass Partners with Turnitin to Integrate Text Similarity Scoring into Graded Discussions

Tempe, AZ; ActiveClass, a social-media-like plugin for the LMS, recently released its official integration with Turnitin, the leading provider of academic integrity solutions.

With the rise of online learning over the past several years, students are increasingly expressing feelings of disconnectedness and instructors are witnessing a “stunning” rise in disengagement. As such, it’s critical that students are able to connect in authentic and simple ways with each other, as well as with their instructors.

Equally important to feeling connected and part of a community is the ability to properly grade virtual student engagement and online discussions in simple, intuitive ways. By adding Turnitin’s text similarity scoring system to online discussions, ActiveClass aims to offer instructors the easiest and most seamless way to critique and grade a student's work.

In regards to the partnership, ActiveClass CEO and co-founder Nate Hurst said, “As class modalities have shifted, the burden on the instructor to offer flexible learning environments has risen dramatically. Our aim is to give them the most intuitive and simple tools to offer synchronous or asynchronous learning environments that also feel organic and natural to the student.”

Hurst continued, “By adding Turnitin’s industry-leading capabilities to our easy grading tools for online discussion forums, we can reduce the amount of time it takes to properly assess a student's work, even in a simple post or comment thread.”

ActiveClass customers such as Harvard and Delgado Community College, among others, had recently been requesting this integration. "We are excited to deliver it to them,” Hurst said.

About Turnitin

Turnitin is a global company dedicated to ensuring the integrity of education and meaningfully improving learning outcomes. For more than 20 years, Turnitin has partnered with educational institutions to promote honesty, consistency, and fairness across all subject areas and assessment types. Turnitin products are used by educational institutions and certification and licensing programs to uphold integrity and increase learning performance, and by students and professionals to do their best, original work.

Turnitin has offices in Australia, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Korea, Mexico, the Netherlands, the Philippines, Sweden, Ukraine, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Over 16,000 academic institutions, publishers, and corporations use Turnitin services: Gradescope by Turnitin, iThenticate, Turnitin Feedback Studio, Turnitin Originality, Turnitin Similarity, ExamSoft, ProctorExam, and Ouriginal. 

About ActiveClass 

ActiveClass is an edtech company offering simple social experiences from within learning management systems. Featuring a modern, social-media-inspired UI, ActiveClass encourages conversation, supports various learning models, facilitates diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, and helps address institutions’ top engagement and retention challenges. To learn more about ActiveClass or get a demo, visit www.activeclass.com.

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