ITS Piloting Plagiarism Service

ITS is working with a committee that has representatives from Student Affairs, Faculty Senate, the Writing Center, English, Student Government, and the Library to investigate campus implementation SafeAssgin. Blackboard has added SafeAssign, a plagiarism detection service, to its latest release. Use of the tool involves electronic submission of papers to the SafeAssign server. Student papers would be stored and scanned to identify passages that may be plagiarized, thus its use has legal, academic, procedural (college and department) and privacy implications. These issues are currently being explored with a committee. Plagiarism detection services tools have limitations. In order to understand the implications of the limitations, two faculty have agreed to pilot SafeAssign this semester; a second broader pilot is planned for the Spring semester. A public forum will be held in the spring where the results of the pilot and the committee's findings will be shared.

Based on committee input, ITS is advising instructors delay use until the pilots and committee discussions are complete. Additional information about plagiarism is available on the UNO Writing Center Resource webpage at http://www.unomaha.edu/writingcenter/resources.php For more information about SafeAssign, enroll in Blackboard organization titled "SafeAssign" where you will find several documents about SafeAssign and other plagiarism detection tools. To access and enroll in the Safe Assign Blackboard Organization follow these steps. Enrolling allows you to participate in the discussion forums and email as well as read any of the documents made available in this organization.

• Log into myBlackboard
• Click on the Community Tab
• Locate the Organization Search Box and type: Safe Assign and click the Go link
• Screen will display search results
• Far right side of screen is an enroll button for the Safe Assign organization. Click on this link and you are enrolled.
• Next time you enter Blackboard you will see Safe Assign under myOrganizations (first page after logging into Blackboard)

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