Ouriginal staff user guide cover image

Introduction

Ouriginal by Turnitin logo

What is Ouriginal?

Ouriginal (which was formerly called Urkund) is a text-recognition tool, accessible from within Brightspace, which can be used to detect possible plagiarism within a piece of writing.

Important:
The university has been licensed to use Ouriginal at FE level only. At HE level, Turnitin should be used to check originality.

How does it work?

When you create an assignment in Brightspace, you can specify whether student papers are submitted to Ouriginal. The text is analysed and checked with potential matching sources from academically published material, the Internet, and previously submitted student documents. When a document displays similarities to other sources a matching profile begins to take shape. The degree of the matches is recorded and any usages of paraphrasing and synonyms are also taken into account. A report is generated and made available to you (which you can share with your students) via Brightspace.

Supported files

Ouriginal supports the following file formats: .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .sxw, .ppt, .pptx, .pdf, .pdf 2.0, .txt, .rtf, .html, .htm, .wps, .odt, .odp, .ods, .tif, .tiff, .ps, .hwp, .zip and .pages. Documents submitted to Urkund should not contain any document protection or encryption.

Creating an assignment

To create an assignment, select Assignments from the Course Tools with Urkund menu.

Note: In some sites in Brightspace Course Tools may be displayed as 'Course Tools with Urkund'. The functions are the same.

Selecting Assignments from the Course Tools menu in the navbar — Course Tools > Assignments

Use the blue button to create a new assignment and enter an assignment name with instructions to students as usual, specifying the Assignment Type to be File submission.

Selecting the type of assignment: File submission — Specifying an Individual File submission assignment

Other assignment settings can be specified as required, for example, a due date can be specified in the Availability Dates & Conditions area of the assignment interface. At the foot of the assignment creation screen there is a HIdden/Visible slider - if you are still drafting your assignment, you can set this to hidden; if you set start and end dates, you will automatically be offered ways to restrict student access until the start date ('visible with access restricted'; 'visible with submission restricted'; or hidden).

Brightspace have comprehensive guidance about setting availability and due dates on their Community pages; and UHI also has a guide to creating assignments which is available in the Support Portal.

Adding plagiarism detection to an assignment

Once you have created an assignment, select Ouriginal (Urkund) from the Course Tools menu (shown opposite).

Note: When accessing Ouriginal for the first time you will see the following message: 'Application Customization Configuration v1.0 by Desire2Learn Incorporated is trying to access your information. Would you like to proceed?'. Put a tick in the box beside 'Do not ask me again for this application' then click the Continue button.

Students may also see this the first time they open an assignment associated with Ouriginal.

Selecting Ouriginal (Urkund) link from Course Tools menu — Course Tools > Ouriginal (Urkund)

On the next screen, on the left-hand side, you will see a list of the assignments you have set up for your unit; on the right side of the screen in the column, labelled Turn On/Off Similarity Detection, you can switch on Ouriginal checking for that particular assignment.

Note: When you click to turn on similarity detection, you are asked if you are sure you want to enable this. Click Yes.

Similarity detection overview tab — Turn On/Off Similarity Detection for an assignment

That is all that is required to set up Ouriginal similarity detection for a Brightspace assignment.

Viewing an Ouriginal report

If similarity detection has been turned on for an assignment, when a student submits a file it is automatically checked by Ouriginal and a report is produced which you can access before feeding back. The sections below show, firstly, how students should submit their work, then how you can access Ouriginal reports.

How a student submits an assignment

Although you have turned on similarity detection for your assignment, students submit files in the same way as they would if similarity detection was off.

When they click on the assignment in Brightspace, they upload either by dragging and dropping or clicking on Upload.

Image showing options for uploading assignment submissions — Options for uploading assignment submissions

After they have attached a file, they click Submit.

An uploaded assignment file — Submit button

How you access an Ouriginal report

To view what Ouriginal has discovered about a student's submission, click on Ouriginal (Urkund) from the Course Tools menu.

Note: You will also have access to individual Ouriginal reports via the emails you will receive automatically when students submit assignments.

Emails will appear in your Outlook inbox addressed from 'noreply@ouriginal.com'.

Initially you will be shown an overview of your assignments and how many submissions there have been.

To get further details, click on the Similarity Score Submission Details tab.

You will immediately see a similarity figure but to get a full report, click on Show Details [+], then the assignment file name, then on View Report.

View Report opens Ouriginal in a new tab, where you can see what it found in the submission.

At the very top of the screen (pictured below), you are told who the submitter is (*not student name or ID), the similarity score (as a percentage of the total word count), the number of words, submission dare and ID.

Just below this, you are given four options for interactive viewing:

the Overview - a summary of the number of affected pages and overall similarity score;
or you can view the matches, one by one, in the order they appear in the document (Findings);
or by active source (Sources);
or view the document in its entirety (Document).

The beauty of this upgraded interface is that every highlighted finding is clickable - revealing further information, and matches can be kept or excluded (e.g. if properly cited/referenced).

Any listed source of plagiarised material is interactive also. Clicking on a link in the list of sources will take you to the web site Ouriginal believes the submission has used.

See the accordions below for further information on each of the views:

Overview

In the Overview, blocks of matching text (text that Ouriginal has found already in existence online) is identified by blue areas on rectangles representing each page of the submission. In this demonstration case there is only one page and one match. Clicking on the blue area activates a popup containing the text Ouriginal says is a match with an online source. By default the match is 'included' in the summary. If you feel it is used legitimately, click Exclude.

Although a useful and quick way of seeing what Ouriginal has found, the fact that this function (Overview) doesn't show any of the surrounding text (which could show that the student cited the online source correctly) makes this somewhat limited.

Findings

Findings makes broader use of the screen, with the student's text on the left and the matched text on the right, one match at a time. If the student has used the matched text legitimately, click 'Exclude this match'.

Note the 'View in document' option at the bottom left. Clicking this will take you to Document view, where you can see all of the matched text, and all of the student's submission in one vertically scrollable window.

Sources

Sources focuses solely on the online sources that Ouriginal links matched text to.

Note the light green bar on the right of the view above. Any vertical green lines represent blocks of matching text, and their position in the document. Clicking on a green line activates a popup.

Document

The most comprehensive of all the views, Document shows the whole of the student submission on the left side of the screen. Anything highlighted in yellow on the left corresponds with matching text (plus online source) on the right.

In our opinion this is the most useful of the views because all elements of matched text can be seen in context, holistically.

Note: Ouriginal updated their interface (as well as their name) a few years ago. By default you will be shown their new interface; however, if you are used to or prefer the old one go to Options in the top right of the screen and select Back to old Urkund (see below).

Official guidance

Ouriginal.com offers a wide selection of Guides and Tutorials on their web site. If you scroll down you will even see a D2L Instructor guide (it should be noted however that the version of Brightspace used in the guide is different to the one we use at UHI).

Giving feedback to students

To give students feedback on their submissions, you need to return to the Ouriginal Plagiarism Submission Details page in Brightspace
(go to: Course tools > Ouriginal (Urkund) > Plagiarism Submission Details).

On the Plagiarism Submission Details page, click on Show Details beneath the assignment.

Then, click on the submission document title - but this time select ‘Submission Feedback’ (shown opposite). This opens the assignment submission in a new browser tab.

Add feedback as appropriate (in the area highlighted in the picture opposite). Don't forget you can also use Brightspace to record audio and video feedback.

To bring the student submission up on the screen, click on the file name.

When complete, either click Save Draft if you plan to edit in future, or click Publish.

Note: It should be noted that the Ouriginal report is not available to students until feedback is placed on the assignment.

After clicking Publish you are given an opportunity to Update or Retract (which stops users seeing their results and feedback).

Once you have clicked Update, simply close the tab.

Update [feedback] button

How students view Ouriginal reports and tutor feedback

To view their Urkund report and your feedback, students should first click on Urkund from the Course tools with Urkund menu.

Clicking Ouriginal (Urkund) will take them to a screen titled Assignments Analyzed for Similarity.

To view further information, students should click first on Show Details, then on the document title where they can select ‘View Report’ or 'Submission Feedback'.

Note: This menu item only becomes available for students when the tutor has added feedback.