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Blackboard and Digital Learning

NEW: Turnitin Draft Coach

Turnitin Draft Coach is a new feature available in Word online through your University of Derby account. It will give you Turnitin reports on your draft work for referencing and paraphrasing errors and guidance on how to improve your work before you submit the final assessment through Blackboard.

  1.   Save your work in your University OneDrive
  2.   Open it in Word on the web (via Microsoft365.com)
  3.   Use the Turnitin menu to access Draft Coach
    1. A sidebar will open on the right, click on the arrow to open the tools
    2. Run each of the tools by clicking the Run button
  4. Use the feedback to improve your work

Remember you can only use the Similarity Check 3 times per document. The other tools (Citations Check and Grammar Guide) are unlimited.

Example of Turnitin Draft Coach Screen

Turnitin Draft Coach provides three tools:

  1. Similarity Check: you can use run up to 3 similarity checks for any document. This uses the same database as the Turnitin system used for submissions via Blackboard.
  2. Citations Checker: this checks for citations that do not have a corresponding reference, and vice versa, allowing you to check that a document contains all the required citations and corresponding references (currently limited to APA and MLA formats).
  3. Grammar Guide: searches a draft for any grammatical mistakes using US-English grammar rules. Any potential errors will be highlighted, categorised, and listed with suggestions on how they could be corrected.

For more information on these functions, see the guide from Turnitin.