In an era when many students have become accustomed to downloading music or content from the Internet, they do not always understand how to properly cite and attribute borrowed content to maintain the originality of their work. Unsurprisingly, school districts are still searching for effective methods to deter and prevent plagiarism while promoting the overall concept of informational literacy.

Regardless of intent, plagiarism presents the very real dilemma of some students gaining unfair advantages over others. Unsurprisingly, institutions are still searching for effective methods of deterrence and prevention. With the goal of helping ensure academic fairness, Blackboard is proud to introduce SafeAssign™ as a core component of the Blackboard Academic Suite™.

SafeAssign is a plagiarism prevention service that allows you to protect the originality of work and ensure a fair playing ground for all of your students. SafeAssign is integrated with enterprise versions of the Blackboard Learning System™, and prevents plagiarism by detecting unoriginal content in student papers within your existing teaching and learning environment. SafeAssign can also deter plagiarism by creating opportunities to educate students on proper attribution and citations while properly leveraging the wealth of information at their disposal. It is available as part of the Blackboard® enterprise platform at no additional cost.

For his part, Michael Chasen, president and CEO of Blackboard, says SafeAssign is a tool that will help clients leverage their participation in the greater Blackboard community of practice. He explains, “As more and more institutions add materials and papers to the SafeAssign Global Reference Database, detecting plagiarism will become more efficient and accurate. No other solution can bring so many clients together to help address an issue that affects all institutions."

How It Works

SafeAssign checks papers and assignments (submitted within the Blackboard Learning System) against an industry-leading collection of databases, including:

• The Internet with billions of source documents and materials
• ProQuest ABI/Inform database with over 1,100 publication titles and about 2.6 million articles from '90s to present time, updated weekly (exclusive access)
• Document archives containing all papers submitted to SafeAssign by users in their respective institutions
• Global Reference Database containing papers that were volunteered by students from Blackboard client institutions to help prevent cross-institutional plagiarism

An Originality Report then is delivered to the teacher, student or both (as determined by the teacher), highlighting any blocks of text in submitted documents that matched reference sources, with links back to the matching documents. Teachers can use the Originality Report to determine if plagiarism has occurred and, if needed, determine the appropriate next steps, based on their own judgment and campus policy or code.

Blackboard also is dedicating resources from Ask Dr. C, a question-and-answer service moderated by an expert group of Blackboard clients, to facilitate a forum on the issue. Furthermore, the SafeAssign wiki (http://wiki.safeassign.com) answers frequently asked questions about the service among a wealth of other resources.

Download Today

SafeAssign is currently available to system adminstrators who can download the SafeAssign Blackboard Building Block™ or Blackboard PowerLink™ from Behind the Blackboard™. Once installed and enabled, instructors can begin using SafeAssign immediately to prevent plagiarism in their courses.

To learn more, visit www.safeassign.com.