Center of Consumer Research and Analytics partners with OHIO IT for fall 2021 project
The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in an increased use of academic technologies at Ohio University. This increased demand has led many OHIO professors to use platforms in new and exciting ways, and it has also pushed vendors to enhance the features and services they offer.
Amidst all this change, it is important to re-assess the effectiveness of the current academic technology portfolio to ensure that the OHIO community is making the most of what is available, as well as to identify areas for improvement.
The current portfolio of centrally supported plagiarism detection tools — Turnitin and Blackboard SafeAssign — have been in use for many years. To better align this portfolio with the changing needs of the OHIO community, OHIO IT has partnered with the Center of Consumer Research and Analytics (CRA) to launch an evaluation of plagiarism detection tools, more specifically to understand the uses and opportunities of Turnitin.
The goal of this process is to recommend a portfolio of plagiarism detection technologies whose feature sets will support the long-term teaching and learning goals of the OHIO community. Immediate changes to the currently available plagiarism detection tools are not in scope.
“The Center of Consumer Research and Analytics’ mission is to transform data into marketing intelligence. Our students have worked closely with key players in many different industries, and have gathered experience in marketing research,” said Professor Dan Dahlen, CRA faculty advisor for the OIT project. “We are excited to be partnering with OIT for the duration of Fall 2021 so that our students can engage with OHIO stakeholders in an authentic learning experience that prepares them for the professional world.”
“We are excited to be partnering with the College of Business’ Center of Consumer Research and Analytics,” OHIO Chief Information Officer Chris Ament said. “Working with talented students to help us explore the attitudes of our faculty and students regarding the uses of OIT’s technology portfolio is a win-win. We can leverage the expertise and best practices provided by the CRA, while we also support student experiential learning to advance our ongoing technology evaluation efforts.”
The project officially kicked off earlier in September. Faculty and select students can expect the CRA research team to reach out in October for focus group sessions and again in November with a survey asking about use cases of and attitudes toward Turnitin.