TurnItIn.com vs WYSIWYG

Every semes­ter, I get at least one stu­dent who asks about the paper sub­mis­sion process in TurnItIn.com. Paper 2 drafts are due on Wednes­day in IS 6100 and Fri­day in IS 7010.

I dis­cussed this issue in this 29 Jan­u­ary arti­cle.

The short ver­sion: When users press the “sub­mit” but­ton to send an assign­ment to TurnItIn.com, the web site retrieves the doc­u­ment from the user’s com­puter. This process is sim­i­lar to upload­ing an attach­ment to a web-based email sys­tem like Gmail or Yahoo Mail!

TurnItIn.com refreshes the web page and dis­plays an unfor­mat­ted, text-only ver­sion of the uploaded paper, along with a sec­ond sub­mit but­ton.

This con­fir­ma­tion step should help users deter­mine if they uploaded the cor­rect file. TurnItIn.com does let instruc­tors limit stu­dents to a sin­gle upload on an assign­ment. But some users get con­fused because their paper is dis­played with­out any for­mat­ting at all!

I’ve always believed this was a usabil­ity issue that TurnItIn.com’s soft­ware and user inter­face design­ers should fix. The only rea­son I can think of is that TurnItIn.com man­age­ment wants to reduce the response time dur­ing the sub­mis­sion upload cycle. Gen­er­at­ing an image or PDF would increase the time needed to sub­mit a paper.

I usu­ally allow stu­dents to upload their file as many times as they wish before the assign­ment deadline.

DWIMNWIS = “do what I meant, not what I said”

TurnItIn.com does send a dig­i­tal receipt via email to the user after a suc­cess­ful sub­mis­sion. But I’m not sure this con­fir­ma­tion mes­sage is enough. TurnItIn.com should always dis­play a PDF or graph­i­cal ver­sion of the for­mat­ted doc­u­ment. Stu­dents who use Microsoft Word, Word­Per­fect, or almost any other Mac or Windows-based word proces­sor usu­ally keep their soft­ware in a lay­out mode that sup­ports WYSIWYG, and dis­plays the actual fonts, mar­gins, spac­ing, and other doc­u­ment attributes.

So I’m not sur­prised when some stu­dents expect TurnItIn.com to dis­play a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) ver­sion of their paper with the for­mat­ting and graph­ics intact. If I hadn’t used TurnItIn.com before, I’d prob­a­bly ask the same question!

Tagged as: email, interface, Microsoft, office, software, usability, WYSIWYG