The Digital Education Team is providing an update on Turnitin and User License Agreements.
You may have heard about concerns regarding Turnitin user license agreements and Generative AI.
When you log in to use Turnitin, staff and students need to accept the terms of agreement to use the platform.
Over the summer, we received a notification from Turnitin that they were updating its license agreement, with the intention that this will be applied to all users (staff and students).
As part of this license agreement, it was proposed that student submissions and staff feedback would be used to train large language models.
We, along with the rest of the sector, had concerns over this. We were unhappy with how Turnitin planned to introduce this update, without warning, and over the security of student work and staff feedback.
Working alongside UCISA, the professional membership body for digital, IT, and information systems in UK higher education, and other universities, we lobbied against this change.
Following this, Turnitin did not introduce the updated license agreement.
You might have seen that other universities are starting to move away from Turnitin. For the year ahead, we are continuing to use Turnitin.
In terms of our own license, we renew on an annual basis, and we are contracted up until July 2027.
We ran a pilot a couple of years ago to look at the feasibility of moving away from Turnitin, but at that point the tools in Blackboard didn’t meet all our requirements. We do keep a close eye on both text-matching and submission tools in Blackboard to see whether they offer a viable alternative to Turnitin.
We meet our Turnitin Customer Account Manager regularly throughout the year, and we’re able to feedback our concerns and issues. We were in touch with them about the proposed changes to the licence agreement. We also work with sector bodies who lobby and advocate with software vendors on behalf HE institutions.
If you’d prefer not to use Turnitin, Blackboard Assignment has submission and marking tools which you can use – all the guidance is available on our web pages, and we’d be happy to work with anyone who would like to switch to using it. It does offer a number of benefits that Turnitin doesn’t have – for example, multi-part submissions and group assignments. However, there are some limitations – the biggest 2 are that marks aren’t released automatically on a ‘Post Date’ and it’s not possible to submit work on behalf of students.
If you have any concerns about this update, you are welcome to contact the Digital Education Team on elearning@aber.ac.uk.
