The Blackboard Assignment tool can have advantages over Turnitin when your students are submitting pieces of work that are not text- or essay-based. For example, you can ask students to submit posters or multimedia (such as videos) into this system. On the other hand, Turnitin currently has a larger database for plagiarism checking and may flag more instances of potential plagiarism.

Instructions

Help in creating your Blackboard Assignment can be found on Blackboard’s Help pages here. Please ignore sections pertaining to “Blackboard Ultra” which is a different system than that used at UoM. These pages include information on:

• How to create assignments
• Settings
• How to download assignments
• How to use Safe Assign for plagiarism checking

You might like to practice making assignments using your sandpit/playground course. Don’t have a sandpit? Find out how to get one here.

Once you start to practice making your assignments, use your Student Preview to pretend to submit a paper, so that you can later “mark” some work.

Special Assignment Type: Video Submissions

If you are asking your students to create a piece of work that is video-based, you have two choices: VoiceThread and Blackboard Assignments. You should choose Blackboard Assignments if you would like the student submissions to be private, as opposed to the whole class seeing each other’s work.

If you would like to run a video assignment, set up your assignment as you normally would but make sure you pass on to students the instructions about uploading videos (in the section below). Students will upload their videos to the Video service and then locate the embed code to input into the text submission area of your assignment.