This page is for Teachers in Moodle.

Types of activities

Currently, only activities of the type Assignment and Quizzes are supported. However, the types of activities in which the IO plugin can be used in your institution depends on what was configured by the system admin. 

Configuring an activity

When creating a new activity (or editing an existing one), the teacher will have an expandable sections called Inspera Originality settings.

Expanding this section will let the teacher configure settings for the generation of the originality report.

Inspera Originality Settings

The list below presents all the settings the Plugin provides but your system admin can define which settings are visible and which can be edited. If you would like to use a specific setting but it is not available please reach out to your system admin.

• Enable Originality Check: defines whether originality reports should be generated for this activity
• Score to display: whether the similarity or the originality score should be used for this activity. Recommendation: originality
• Allow all supported File Types: defines if all file types supported by IO are allowed. If not, then the list of allowed files can be defined (in the File types to submit field).
• AI authorship detection: if IO should detect whether AI was used in the creation of the file
  • this is a paid feature and is not available to everyone
• Archive Documents: if the files submitted to IO should be stored in order to be used in future originality checks
• Enable Contextual Similarity: whether a custom similarity percentage should be defined
  •  "Context similarity threshold": When Enable Contextual Similarity is selected, this new setting is displayed. Here the teacher can select the minimum percentage for similarity for two sentences to be considered similar. The minimum accepted is 50%
  • If not selected, the value used is 50%
• Exclude URLs?: whether to provide a list of URLs to be excluded from the originality check.
  • URLs to exclude: When "Exclude URLs?" is selected, this new setting is displayed. Here the URLs to be excluded should be listed, separated by a comma (,)
• Include URLs?: whether to provide a list of URLs to be included from the originality check.
  • URLs to include: When "Include URLs?" is selected, this new setting is displayed. Here the URLs to be included should be listed, separated by a comma (,)
• Metadata Analysis: if IO should use the file's metadata for the originality analysis
• Share report with the students: if and when the report should be shared with the students. For more details, please check the section "Sharing the report with the Students"
• Translations: if originality should be checked against other languages.
  • This option is always disabled by default
  • Select supported translation languages: When "Translations" is selected, this new setting is displayed. Here, the teacher can select up to 3 languages against which the originality can be checked
• Submit attached files and in-line text: define if both attached files and in-line texts should be submitted for originality checking or only one of them
  • In assignment group submissions only attached files will be submitted
• When should the files be submitted: when the files should be submitted to IO. There are two possible values
  • This setting is only available for assignments.
  • In quizzes the files are submitted when the quiz attempt is finished
  • When file is first uploaded: submits the student submission file to IO when the student uploads the file
  • Submit file when student sends for marking: submits the file to IO when the student sends the file for marking. This option is only available for activities which require the students to click the submit button (under Submission settings)

Changing settings

If any originality setting, except for Share report with students, is changed, only future submissions will be impacted.

The Share report with the students setting can be changed at any point and will give or revoke access to the report from all past and future submissions.

Some settings are not displayed or can not be edited

It is possible that not all the settings listed above are available for the Teachers. If this happens, please check if you have a "Show More" option, if so click on it and look for the setting. If the setting is still not displayed or it is not editable and you want to have access to it, please reach out to your Moodle system admin as they can define which settings are available to/editable by the teachers.

Copying Activity

When copying an activity that has Inspera Originality Checking enabled, the new activity will have the same settings as the original one, except for Translations. This setting is always disabled by default and needs to be enabled when the teacher wants to use.

Sharing the report with the Students

The setting "Share report with the students" defines if and when the originality reports are shared with the students. There are four possible values:

• Not shared: the report is not shared with the students
• Immediately after it is available: it is shared with the students as soon as the report is generated
• After grading: it is shared with the students after the teacher finished grading the activity
• Due date: it is shared with the students on the due date of the activity (after it is generated)

A student will only see the report if it is set up to be shared AND it has been successfully generated. The student will never see a report or its placeholder if the submission's status is queued, pending or (external)error. Only reports with the status finished will be shared. For more details about the status of a submission, please check this page.

Assignments

Group Submissions in Assignments

An activity can be configured to be a group submission by enabling the option "Group Submission Settings" > "Students submit in groups".

In these cases, the IO report will also be shared amongst the students in the group, regardless of which student submitted it. In order to know more about Moodle's group submissions please check Moodle's documentation. In Inspera Originality, the submission and corresponding report will be also be assigned to all the students that belong to the group.

Moodle provides two "Submission types": Online text and File submissions.

In a group submission assignment, only File submissions will be sent for originality checking.

If a teacher sets up an assignment with group submissions and online text, the teacher will be prompt with a warning upon saving the assignment.

Generate all Reports at the assignment level

When accessing an activity, there is a button at the top right corner that triggers the generation of all missing reports, i.e., it will send to IO all the submissions of that activity that do not have a report, either because it was not yet sent to IO or because an error occurred in the previous report generation attempt.

After clicking on it, the button, the user will be prompt with a confirmation window and then a task will run in the background queueing all the submissions that do not have an originality report.

A message will appear stating the task is running in the background and the button will show that the task is still running. When all the submissions are added to the queue, the button will show the time of the last request. Once the submissions are queued, they follow the normal process.

The access to this button depends on the user role and is configured by the Moodle's system admin.

Accessing the Report in Assignments

There are two ways for the teacher to access the report:

• when listing all submissions
• when grading a submission

1. Access the report when listing submissions

   The teacher can access the report by accessing the Submissions tab of the Activity. 

   

   For each submission, the teacher can see the files submitted along with the originality report (1) and the originality index (2). Clicking on the originality report (1) will open a new tab with the report, so that the teacher can analyse it.

   If the report is not yet available, the current status (following the flow described above) will be displayed. If it is an error, please reach out to your system admin to know more.

   In case of an error, the teacher will be able to see the cause for failure. 

   

2. Access the report when grading a submission

   The teacher can also access the report when grading a submission. 

   

   

   The teacher can see the files submitted along with the originality report (1) and the originality index (2). Clicking on the originality report (1) will open a new tab with the report, so that the teacher can analyse it.

   If the report is not yet available, the current status (following the flow described above) will be displayed. If it is an error, please reach out to your system admin to know more.

Quizzes

When configuring a Quiz all the plugin settings described above are available except for "When should the files be submitted". The submission will occur when the student submits their attempt.

The plugin will will be applied to questions of the type Essay.

Accessing the Report in Quizzes

In order to access the report, the teacher should enter the specific attempt by going to the Results tab and reviewing the attempt. At the end the report will be shown alongside with the score.

The plugin will be applied to questions of the type Essay and it will include both uploaded documents or in-line texts, depending on the plugin configuration ("Submit attached files and in-line text" setting).

Reading the report

The originality score represents the level of originality concerns found within a document, which means that the lower the value the better. For more information about the index, please check out this page.

The background colour of the originality score represents the risk a submission is not original:

• Red: High Risk
• Yellow: Medium Risk
• Green: Low Risk

The definition of high/medium/low risk can be configured directly in IO's settings. For more information on this please check this page.

The report explains in more detail how the index was calculated. For more information about the report, please check out this page.

To know more about how the report is built please check out the articles in this section.

FAQ

• What is the flow of the submissions status

  A submission to IO may have the following statuses:

  • Queued: the student's document has not yet been submitted to Inspera originality
  • Pending: the student's document has been submitted to Insperaa Originality but the report has not yet been generated
  • Finished: the report has been generated. It is available to teachers and, if shared, to students. For more information on how to share a report with the students please check this page (under "Sharing the report with Students")
  • Error: an error in Moodle prevented the file to be submitted to IO (e.g., Moodle could not find the file to be submitted to IO)
  • External Error: an error in IO prevented the successful generation of the report (e.g., the system was temporarily down)

  The following flow depicts these statuses: 

  

• How long should the report generation take?

  Every 5 minutes Moodle will check if there are any submissions in Queue and will submit those to Inspera Originality. This will change the submissions status to Pending.

  Every 5 minutes Moodle will check it there are any new reports generated by Inspera Originality. If so, the status of those submissions will change to either finished or error, depending on the success of the report generation.

  On average we have observed a processing time of 8 minutes per 1000 words to generate the report.

• No submissions have a status or a report

  When the student submits, their submission should be automatically shown (to the teacher) as Queued (and then it will follow the workflow explained above). If neither status nor report are shown next to any of the submissions, most likely the plugin was not enabled for that activity. If that's the case just enable it and (if it's an assignment) click the generate reports button.

• Some submissions do not have a status or a report

  If only some submissions have no status or report, it means the submission was skipped. There are some reasons for this behaviour:

  • It's a group submission and it was an in-line text submission, i.e., the student wrote their answer in an input box directly in Moodle
  • It's a file upload and the plugin is only configured for in-line text submissions (setting "Submit attached files and in-line text") or vice versa
  • the file type of the file uploaded by the student (setting "Allow all supported File Types" set to "no" and file type not selected in the "File types to submit" setting or "Allow all supported File Types" set to "yes" but file type is not supported by IO) 

• I duplicated an activity with translations enabled but translations are not being considered

  Translations are always disabled by default. Even when duplicating an activity with translations enabled, the copy version will have translations disabled. If translations are needed in the new activity, they need to be manually enabled and configured.

• After receiving some submissions I realized I had not enabled the plugin

  As soon as you realize it, enable it. This will only impact new submissions. If it's an assignment, you can use the "generate reports" button to generate the reports for the already existing submissions.

• After receiving some submissions I realized I had not configured the plugin correctly

  You can go back and change the settings. But they will only be applied to new submissions and there is currently no way of regenerating an already generated report. The workaround is to ask your students to resubmit.

• One or more submissions have been Queued for a long time

  If a submission has been Queued for longer than 5 minutes, then then there could be an issue with the scheduled task ‘send_files’. Most likely the task is not running or is delayed. Please reach out to your system admin.

• One or more submissions have been Pending for a long time

  There are two reasons for a submission to be in the Pending status:

  • It is still being processed by IO. On average we have observed a processing time of 8 minutes per 1000 words to generate the report. If there are many requests being processed, it can take longer.
  • there was an error when processing the file. When this happens we retry the processing every 5 minutes. If after 24 hours IO is still reporting an error, then the status will change to External Error. Please wait at least 24 hours before reporting an issue to your system admin.