Hi Yanna
We are considering this type of thing too but Turnitin (TII) is a little harder I think.
We spoke to Turnitin about automatically creating submission points from a database of assessments. We found out that Turnitin submission points aren't blackboard assignment types, they are just regular content types with a little extra in the background (??). So there's no calendar entry and due date for the deadline.
This, I think, is why, for us, the TII set-up form and viewing of turnitin submission points is via an iframe (Tii basic). I guess somewhere in the background a grade centre column is created and the Turnitin system sends a grade over to the grade centre.
I don't know if you can query the Turnitin system via their API (I think you can) but take a look at:
https://github.com/turnitin/moodle-mod_turnitintooltwo/tree/master/sdk <-- I know it's Moodle but this is the only place I could find where you can see how to call the Turnitin API and create a submission point. It would be great if we could see how it was done in the Tii building block as that might explain how the grade centre bit is done.
If you can match a submission point to the appropriate grade centre column and pull the due date from that. Then use something like the Grades Journey REST API to set the due date. I'm saying this like it's possible but not checked it. I've used the Grades Journey API to set-up a studentcentral assignment type and grade centre column but not checked if you can edit the column due date.
I wonder if it would be easier (still hard) to create Tii submissions automatically and also create the associated grade centre column with due date. I don't know how the grade centre column and turnitin inbox would be linked though. You'd end-up replicating most of the Blackboard building block features. This might get easier with LTI?
I should point out that we've spoke to Turnitin about this and they were initially worried about "automatic" thinking it would possibly create 1000s of submissions points on-the-fly at the start of term. We would still want human intervention so, for example, making a tutor view all submission points for a module and hitting the confirm button to set them up. What we want to do is store all assessment data in a single location and use that to set-up assessment points, dates in Blackboard/SITS as required.
I note you said you'd set up a grade column automatically too. Would you share how you did that? Did you use the Grades Journey API or something else?
OR: you just create an external table with Turnitin submission point name/ID and due date and compare the attempt date with that? You could also grab all the grade centre data and export to an external database and compare that way.
We use and have modified this to create our own REST API calls:
https://github.com/AllTheDucks/atd-bbws <-- this is brilliant. We use it to grab Grades, Grade Headings, Groups, group memberships and other stuff needed outside of Blackboard. We are on hosted Blackboard and don't currently have the access to the full or cloned Blackboard database. You could use this and modify it to send all your grade centre grades/attempt dates to your institutional reporting database and have the due date from somewhere else (student record system/manually maintained).
Sorry for the waffle.
Jason
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