Blackboard To Offer SafeAssign Integration For Moodle And Moodlerooms

WASHINGTON, Nov. 1, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Blackboard Inc., a leading education technology company for teaching, learning and student engagement, today announced it will offer its SafeAssign plagiarism prevention tool for Moodlerooms, the company's open-source based LMS. Historically only available within Blackboard Learn, SafeAssign is a tool used to promote originality, create opportunities to help students identify how to properly attribute sources rather than paraphrase, and increase interaction between students and teachers. Availability of the integration for Moodle and Moodlerooms is expected by early 2018.

SafeAssign empowers faculty and students to protect the originality of work, and also creates an opportunity to educate students on the importance of proper attribution and citation. Effective as both a deterrent and an academic integrity tool, SafeAssign compares submitted assignments against a set of sources to identify areas of overlap between the submitted assignment and existing works.

"SafeAssign is a core component of any written assessment at Liberty University. We rely on the Originality Reports as an aid for our faculty and to provide guidance to both residential and online students," said Bailey Anderson, Program Manager and Adjunct Instructor at Liberty University. "Without SafeAssign, our faculty would be spending a lot of time doing research and less time teaching critical concepts to our students."

SafeAssign compares student works against approximately 150 million documents across several content sources, including the Internet and Blackboard's Global Reference Database, which contains papers that were volunteered by students from Blackboard client institutions to help prevent cross-institutional plagiarism. An Originality Report is then delivered to the faculty member, student or both (as determined by the instructor), which highlights any blocks of text in submitted documents that match reference sources, with links back to the matching documents on the Internet or in supported content databases. Instructors can then determine the appropriate next steps based on their own judgment and campus' policy or code.

"Plagiarism is not a new concept, but the availability of information in today's digital age has made the idea of authorship even more difficult to understand for students," said Phill Miller, Vice President of Teaching and Learning at Blackboard. "SafeAssign has been servicing Blackboard Learn users for a decade, so bringing originality detection to Moodle and Moodlerooms is an exciting step forward. Through this tool, Blackboard is helping our clients solve a fundamental institutional confidence problem and educate students on the importance of academic integrity and attribution in all areas of writing."

Moodlerooms is the open source division of Blackboard, the largest Moodle partner in the world.  Blackboard started to provide Moodle solutions in 2012 with the acquisition of Moodlerooms and NetSpot, and it has since contributed to Moodle development with funds, code, bug fixes, and technology innovation. Moodlerooms supports more than 1,400 customers and 4 million active users worldwide. The LMS is hosted in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud, delivering a reliable and scalable platform that ensures availability without large investment in hardware or support, or concerns about bandwidth and/or backup files storage.

To learn more about SafeAssign for Moodlerooms, visit the Blackboard blog.

About Blackboard Inc.
Our mission is to partner with the global education community to enable learner and institutional success, leveraging innovative technologies and services. With an unmatched understanding of the world of the learner, the most comprehensive student-success solutions, and the greatest capacity for innovation, Blackboard is education's partner in change.

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SOURCE Blackboard Inc.

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