SafeAssign

At today's online in-service, I facilitated a session on SafeAssign, a plagiarism and source matching tool built into Blackboard. Implementing SafeAssignments into our courses can help deter plagiarism, teach students about proper source attribution, and provide information for faculty as they decipher and determine possible instances of plagiarism.

If you are developing an assignment with a research component - or if you are redeveloping a course that already contains a research-based assignment - I encourage you to set up the assignment as a SafeAssignment rather than a regular assignment. These assignments are integrated with the Grade Center just like other assignments, but have the added feature of checking for source matching. 

The resources below will help answers many of your questions and illustrate for you how to use SafeAssign in your redevelopment projects:

• Recording of SafeAssign in-service session: View the Elluminate Live! recording 
• SafeAssign Wiki 
• SafeAssign Instructor Manual 
• Tutorials on YouTube: 
• SafeAssign - 411 for Faculty 
• Changing a Course Assignment to a SafeAssignmen

If you have any other questions about SafeAssign, please contact me!

March 9, 2009

Good Morning Developers,


Today I will be going into your courses to check for 25% completion. If you have any concerns about meeting this deadline please let me know.


Plagiarism:



We have found that as students have more and more access to information via the Internet our instances of plagiarism have increased. In order to combat this plagiarism increase many faculty members have started taking advantage of our SafeAssign feature feature that is built into Blackboard. SafeAssign compares submitted assignments against a set of academic papers to identify areas of overlap between the submitted assignment and existing works. SafeAssign can be used to prevent plagiarism and to create opportunities to help students identify how to properly attribute sources rather than paraphrase.


I have created a new "How To" document on how to create a SafeAssignment in your course and have e-mailed it to all of you. If you are developing an assignment with a research component I encourage you to set up your assignment as a SafeAssignment rather than a regular assignment. These assignments are integrated with the Grade Center just like other assignment but just have the added feature of checking for plagiarism.

Have a great week!