How to provide feedback and comments in Turnitin

Moodle Help & Support (Staff)

This refers to Moodle 4.1 from December 2023 onward.

In Turnitin, as well as providing a grade for an assignment electronically, you can also provide comments, store frequently used comments (to save you retyping them), and give overall feedback to a student about their assignment. The following topics are covered, and you can click the link to go straight to a particular topic:

Providing overall feedback.
Adding comments to an assignment.
Adding an existing comment.
Adding a new comment.
Managing and archiving Commonly used comments.
Multiple markers.

Navigating to the Submissions inbox in Turnitin

Go to your module (you do not need to turn editing on).
Click on the assignment name/title, for example, .
Click on the little blue pen in the Grade column in the line corresponding to the assignment you wish to give feedback on.

Note: You are now working on Turnitin's server NOT the Moodle server at the University of Nottingham. This can be slow.

Providing overall feedback

You can create a general comment for an assignment in text or audio recorded form.

Go into an assignment from the Submissions inbox. This opens up the online grading view.
Click on the icon showing a pen in a box to the right of the assignment you opened.
1. If using audio feedback, click on the blue circle to start recording. The maximum recording time is 3 minutes. Click on the square to stop recording. If you want to delete your recording, click on the trash bin.
2. If using text feedback, click on the text box to enter your comments. The maximum number of characters is 5000. This will save itself automatically; you can come back and edit it if you need to.

Feedback summary

Adding comments to an assignment

Go into an assignment.
The default view when you enter is the QuickMarks comments screen. You can add comments by simply clicking where you wish to enter your comment and selecting the type you wish to use. For more functionalities, click on the QuickMarks icon in the right column .

Note: You should already see some commonly used comments in your list (provided by Turnitin). To see the full comment, hover your cursor over the existing comment; this will display the full comment in the blue box in the bottom-right of the screen. You can edit any of the existing comments once placed in the assignment.

Adding an existing comment

Click and drag the existing comment from the 'Commonly Used' comments (screenshot above) into the assignment. This will display the comment on the assignment but not directly associate it with any text in the assignment i.e. it will be a floating comment.

OR

Highlight a section of the assignment text and click on the QuickMarks icon that appears and select the appropriate comment. This will highlight the text selected in yellow and add the comment to the assignment (see below). Students will be able to see in more details what the QuickMarks means by clicking on the comment.

Adding a new comment

Click anywhere in the assignment or highlight a section of the assignment text. Click on the Speech bubble. This brings up a comment box where you can write a new comment. This will produce a floating comment.

Note: To save a new comment to the commonly used comments section click on the link Convert to QuickMark within the comment window (as above). You will be asked you provide a title and select a set to add it to, aiding organisation of all your comments, e.g. Punctuation.

Managing and archiving commonly used comments

To delete or rearrange comments in the sets, follow the steps below:

Click on the drop down menu in the QuickMarks section to select the set you want (in the screen shot below, 'Commonly Used' set is selected), then click on the cogwheel icon.

You can click on a different set from the list to modify if required but the previously selected set will have a star at the end of it to show it's active. Click on the 3 dots at the top of the 'Sets' column to access more functions like creating a New set, Import set or Export set, Hide set, or Make active set (if you want to activate a different set), and if you created any new set, you can also Delete set.
You can:
- Add a new comment by clicking on the '+' in the first column.
- Add an existing comment to a new set by clicking on Add to Set.
- Remove a comment you added to a set by clicking on the '-' to the right of that comment.

4. If you created your own comment, you can edit it by clicking on the pen icon on the right of the name.

5. You can archive comments by clicking on Archive, this will remove them from all the QuickMark sets and assignments in which they currently reside.

NB: You can restore archived comments by clicking on the Archived folder in the 'Sets' column, then click the comment you want to restore and click the Restore button.

Multiple markers

If there are multiple markers, opening a student's submission in Feedback Studio will activate the marker's layer. Once a marker has left feedback within their layer, the feedback will be available for other markers to view if they wish.

Note: To view all marker layers for a paper, each marker must have accessed the paper and left feedback. This will cause the marker's name to appear within the Active Layers side panel in Feedback Studio. Marking layers can be toggled on and off, just like any other layer in Turnitin Feedback Studio, to provide multiple sources of feedback for a student.

Help and Support (Staff)

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