There are two Turnitin tools integrated with Canvas. Don’t know if this is the right one for you? Visit the Using Turnitin with Canvas page for more information.

Setting up an assignment using the External Tool

In Course Navigation, click the Assignments link.

To add a new assignment, click the +Assignment button.

Enter the assignment’s name, details, total points possible, and choose your preferred display of grades. These steps are unchanged from creating a normal Canvas assignment.

Use the Submission Type dropdown to select External Tool.

Once External Tool is selected, you will be prompted to Enter or find an External Tool URL. Use the Find button to pop open a menu.

From this menu, select Turnitin External Tool. Note that the Turnitin Plagiarism Framework is not enabled in this way. If you wish to use the Plagiarism Framework, please see these instructions for its use.

Now you may complete the rest of the Canvas assignment set-up as per normal. (For more information on Canvas assignments please see our Assignments help guide.)

Once the set-up is complete click Save. (We recommend that you not Save & Publish because there are still a couple of extra steps before this assignment is ready for student submissions.)

Completing assignment setup with the Turnitin External Tool settings

Once the assignment is saved, the Turnitin External Tool Settings dashboard will load. This is where you will deal with the settings that are specific to Turnitin assignments, and it is very important that you review these settings prior to publishing the assignment.

Start, Due and Feedback Release Dates
These dates are independent of the any due or availability dates that you may have set up on the Canvas side of this assignment. Students will not be able to submit prior to the start date you set here, and they will not be able to see any feedback you have left on their work until after the feedback release date.

Optional Settings
The settings in this area determine the nature of the similarity report generated by Turnitin and it is important that you click on  Optional Settings to review these.  Once you have done so, click Submit.

Publishing your Turnitin External Tool assignment

Students will not be able to see or access this assignment until it is published in Canvas. To publish, return to the Assignments page and click the publish icon.

When this icon shows a green checkmark, the assignment is published.

Grading Turnitin External Tool submissions

In Course Navigation, click the Assignments link.

Click on the name of the assignment that you want to grade. This will open your Turnitin Assignment Inbox for this assignment. You will see the names of students enrolled in your course, the titles of their submitted papers, and other information about their submissions.

To grade in Turnitin, click the pencil icon. A new browser window will open with the paper displayed in Turnitin’s site. For more information on using Turnitin’s grading tools, please see Turnitin’s help documentation.

When you’re ready to enter the score for the submission, use the box at the top of the Turnitin page. Once this is entered, you may close the window. All your comments and the score you have entered are automatically saved. The score will be automatically imported into your Canvas Gradebook.