03 July 2026, 21:47

Dear reader,

I recently had contact with someone from Turnitin. I had a question reguarding a possible integration with Mahara and Turnitin. I understand that there were previous discussions, establishing a direct integration but that there were no updates whatsoever. Is there any progress on this topic and what is the latest news?

I'd like to know if this can be realized and if possible, when this can be realized. I think this can be a grate development for us but also for Mahara.

Thank you in advance,

Kind Reguards,

Enrico van Rijsingen

04 July 2026, 5:00

Agreed. We have educational tracks refusing to use Mahara as long as it doesn't support Plagiarism checks.

And yes, we can debate a lot why we should still have those scans, or we can debate that a portfolio is more than text - but trust me, I did. Yet exam committees demand plagiarism to be checked. 

My idea: Mahara could use the 'export' function. Try to limit that to text/word/pdf/etc only. Make an export of these files, send them through the plagiarism scan from f.e. Turnitin, get the score back and add them to the blocks or somewhere else where the files reside in Mahara.

Might be a lot of work though.

08 July 2026, 15:35

Hi Enrico,

Yes, we've had conversations with Turnitin in the past. At the moment we are a bit in a a holding pattern as Turnitin was working on the asset manager for Moodle, which would make it easier to connect an LTI activity in the Moodle assignment. Apologies, if I'm summarising too much and not entirely accurately. That's why we haven't progressed the topic because we wanted to take advantage of that work instead of developing a custom plugin or extending the plugin and then having to redo the work.

If anybody works with Ouriginal, we have a proof of concept, and I can get them in touch with our EU team who developed the changes to the Moodle plugin to allow for plagiarism checking through that. This work had not been looked at for the Turnitin plugin due to the work that Turnitin is doing on LTI.

The Ouriginal integration does the following:

1. Add a portfolio to the Moodle assignment that uses the Mahara assignment submission plugin with the extension to support plagiarism checking using Ouriginal.
2. When the portfolio is added, a web service call is made to Mahara, asking Mahara to provide the portfolio as an HTML export, leaving out all predefined artefacts like images, audio, and video files, i.e. anything that Ouriginal cannot check any way. That's the 'HTML lite' export option you see in the plugin administration in Mahara.
3. Send the resulting Zip file to Moodle into the assignment.
4. Moodle sends it to Ouriginal through the normal processes in the assignment.
5. The similarity report is available through Moodle.

Once the asset manager is available in Moodle, we can review what's needed.

Cheers

Kristina

08 July 2026, 21:53

Hi Kristina,

Can you please give more details what you mean with 'Once the asset manager is available in Moodle, we can review what's needed.'?

Perhaps I can help with that. The system you describe sounds exactly like it could work with Turnitin as well.

And we would prefer a solution like Ouriginal, not using LTI, but using Mahara submission plugin.

13 July 2026, 8:53

Hi Richard,

The asset manager (actually the LTI 1.3 Asset Processor) would make it possible to leverage LTI within the Moodle assignment to connect to Turnitin rather than needing the custom Turnitin Moodle plugin. As far as I understand, Turnitin is consolidating how it connects to LMSs to make maintaining the connections easier. I don't know when this work is going to be completed. Since it would mean that the existing Turnitin plugin is not maintained and used, we wanted to build the connection to Mahara on top of the new functionality as we would then ideally also be able to leverage that for the Mahara assignment submission plugin.

If you would like to sponsor the work to connect to the current Turnitin plugin rather than wait for the new connection, I can get you in touch with our Moodle team to scope the work.

Thank you

Kristina