STELAR

Canvas is currently available at: http://canvas.stthomas.edu

You have a great number of support resources at your disposal when it comes to Canvas.

1. All faculty and students have access to Canvas Support, which you can content by clicking on the Help icon in the Left-hand navigation.  Canvas support is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and is a fantastic first content for all of your Canvas related questions.  If your question cannot be answer by Canvas, they will refer it back to ITS support for followup. Canvas Support excels as a support resource in the moment you most need support.
2. ITS is another support resource at your disposal.  Whether you wish to contact us by email, phone or visit us in one of our two walk-up locations, ITS is ready to help you leverage Canvas.
   
3. STELAR is also available for all of your Canvas related needs: by email, by scheduled appointment, or if you just want to stop by STELAR in LIB LL 20.
4. Canvas Guides.

Yes!

Canvas itself has built an extensive support library of on-demand resources, both videos as well as static documents, called Canvas Guides.  You can access the guides in a couple of different ways.

If you are already logged into Canvas...

1. You can click the Help icon on the left
2. From the Help menu, you can choose "Canvas Guides"

If you are not logged into Canvas

1. Canvas Guides are available at: https://community.canvaslms.com/community/answers/guides

VeriCite makes it easy to identify and investigate possible plagiarism in the papers your students submit. It’s a tool embedded in your learning platform that turns potentially negative situations into positive teaching moments, changing the conversation from “caught you” to “taught you.” VeriCite helps teach the value of academic integrity as part of a broad approach that includes well-designed assignments, resources on proper citations and instructor-student conversations.

The use of VeriCite is entirely optional. You can use it in one assignment and not another. Your first step is to decide whether to use VeriCite. If you use VeriCite in your assignments, make sure that your students are aware that their work is being checked and that they have access to resources about properly citing the works of others.

Step-by-step:

1. Create an assignment as usual. Check the box next to Enable VeriCite Submissions.
2. Finish setting up the assignment then click on Update and make sure to publish the assignment
3. Your students can submit papers as soon as the assignment is available.

To view VeriCite reports:

• The link to the VeriCite report will display in Speedgrader and in the Grades area. Click on the VeriCite report link to open the report.
• The report will be regenerated each time it is viewed and displayed within a few seconds.
• Explore the results by clicking on sentences in the report or by clicking on a source in the source comparison panel. You can exclude specific sources or sentences from the report. Also, you can use the comment feature to add annotations to the report.

Interpreting the VeriCite report

VeriCite scores each sentence by the matches that are found in VeriCite’s massive index of public resources, in Microsoft’s Bing search index and in your institution’s private repository of student papers submitted to VeriCite. Sentences are color coded from low to high match. Similar to other services, the VeriCite score is the number of plagiarized sentences divided by the total number of sentences with small adjustments based on the strength of the matches. If you plagiarize three sentences out of ten, you should receive between a 28 and a 32 based on the strength of the matches.

It’s up to you to determine if the paper includes inappropriately used content. Any sentence that is scored as a high match is worth investigating. A paper with several medium match sentences may suggest some paraphrasing or patch writing. Plagiarism can be accidental as well. Generally, if the submitted paper is scored above 15% (under “Details” in the report) you should investigate the sources. You can click on each sentence to find its corresponding match; you can click on matching materials to find the corresponding sentences.

Be careful interpreting matches to other plagiarized papers and citations other than the primary source. You can selectively ignore any matches (click on down arrow for source and select “ignore”); the paper will be automatically rescored.

Familiar with TurnItIn or SafeAssign? How is VeriCite different?

All plagiarism services help identify matching texts, but none covers all sources of written material, and so no single service will ever be fully authoritative. The success of these learning tools is always based on the instructor’s investigation of the results which VeriCite makes as easy as possible. VeriCite’s coverage is very comprehensive and rapidly growing. VeriCite compares each submitted paper against many terabytes of public, academically-oriented content that is already indexed by VeriCite. We are adding about one million sites each day. VeriCite also compares against all the papers your students have submitted through your learning management platform. VeriCite uses external search engines to find content that we have not yet indexed. Finally, we are actively negotiating with publishers to index the content they license to universities. Will VeriCite capture every instance of plagiarism? No, and no plagiarism service can. Should you expect VeriCite results to match those from SafeAssign or TurnItIn? No, not precisely, because each plagiarism service uses different methods for matching and scoring, and each compares to a different database of source materials. Does it help you engage your students on issues of academic integrity? The more it is used by your institution, the more resources you suggest for indexing, and the more your publishers allow us to protect their work, the more effective VeriCite will become. Is VeriCite effective today? Yes, but you be the judge.