Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - Who is Turnitin?

Turnitin is a name familiar to many students and educators across Australia and New Zealand. The company, best known for its drive to bolster academic integrity, has touched the lives of countless learners over the past two decades. Yet, its Asia-Pacific office was only established in 2016, signalling a commitment to supporting local education systems beyond its US headquarters.

In a wide-ranging interview, Turnitin's Regional Vice President for Asia-Pacific, James Thorley, outlined the company's approach as it continues to shape the field of educational technology. According to Thorley, Turnitin's central mission is "to ensure the integrity of global education and to meaningfully improve learning outcomes." He explained that the company delivers on this mission through a suite of tools that "help schools deliver better assessments to their students in a more efficient way and also in a way that maintains the integrity."

Thorley discussed the diversity of Turnitin's offerings, which stretch from secondary and higher education to research and professional qualifications. He noted: "There's Feedback Studio, Authenticate, Gradescope, ExamSoft – some are for higher education, some for secondary, some crossover – but the focus for all of them is on assessment and integrity."

Although the US remains home to Turnitin's global headquarters, Thorley described a far-reaching presence: "Even before the pandemic we were very dispersed globally. The office here in Australia has been open since 2016. We have a number of other small offices across Asia now as well... In future we do see ourselves as being a very global company with not one HQ in any one location."

Recent years have seen a spike in demand for innovations that address increasingly complex academic challenges. Two developments stand out. The first is Turnitin's tool aimed at combating contract cheating - a pressing concern for university administrators. "For those that don't know, contract cheating is essentially where a student outsources their work to a third party, so they're not doing the work themselves," Thorley explained. "It's both more serious and harder to detect than traditional copy-paste plagiarism."

Thorley recounted that several Australian universities, particularly UNSW, approached Turnitin when contract cheating emerged as a growing issue. "We've worked with universities... to develop a tool to really help them address that both at the individual instructor... level and as a university as a whole." The company gathered and analysed data in collaboration with institutions before releasing the tool. "Specifically last year we really saw increasing interest and adoption and we're very proud of the impact it's had, particularly here in Australia where it was the interest was greatest," he added.

The second major innovation is Gradescope, initially built to make marking and assessment more efficient for STEM subjects, but which has rapidly evolved. "Gradescope initially was developed with the idea of STEM subjects in mind... where a lot of the assessment is done on pen and paper... so we developed that initially with the idea of taking the assessment into an online environment where the process could be a lot more efficient and you wouldn't lose any of that data," said Thorley.

The COVID-19 pandemic hastened this evolution. "Now of course when the pandemic hits and everything shifts online, it really changes everything," Thorley said. "We'd already had plans to broaden the tool to address more subject types... but the pandemic really accelerated everything... we saw a huge increase in usage last year especially."

According to Thorley, user feedback on Gradescope has been overwhelmingly positive. "The feedback that we get from users of the tool in terms of the impact it's having on them... is really rewarding and really powerful," he said.

Beyond contract cheating and online assessment, Thorley highlighted a wider shift in education towards "authentic" assessment. He described a movement away from standard exam formats, particularly in Australia and New Zealand, with universities "trying to get away from exams as a type of assessment because they're not always the best test of learning." Instead, there is a push for tasks that better reflect the challenges students will face in the real world after graduation.

This transition has not come without hurdles. "To do authentic assessment at scale is very hard... there's a whole change management process," Thorley explained. Educators, he noted, have to reconsider approaches they may have used for decades, and questions of integrity become more complex in an online environment.

The pandemic, once again, proved a catalyst: "When COVID hits, again, it disrupts everything... everything has to move online quickly... but it can also be a catalyst for change." Thorley said that this shift prompted many academics "to think about what they were doing," weighing up how to best transfer or adapt assessment methods to online formats.

Looking ahead, Turnitin aims to build a platform that will serve these emerging needs. "We're going to be planning on... building a platform to really serve these needs... and how as well, of course, can we build in integrity to the whole process," Thorley stated. He described this as both a "huge challenge" and "a huge opportunity," not just for the current year, but the coming years.

While universities are Turnitin's immediate focus due to scale and urgency, Thorley recognised the eventual expansion of its impact. "Over time I could see it impacting on every aspect of the education system," he said.

Supporting this vision is a growing local presence. "We started in 2016 with just three or four staff and I came over from the UK, and we're now at 27 people in the Australian office, based here in Melbourne," Thorley outlined. The team covers sales, marketing, customer success, and technical support, serving customers across Australia, New Zealand, and Hong Kong.

Asked how educational organisations can engage with Turnitin, Thorley pointed to a variety of channels, including their vidcast and podcast series, 'Integrity Matters'. But at its heart, it comes down to connection. "You can personally reach out to me on LinkedIn if you have any questions for me personally, but those are the channels I suggest that you can contact and interact with us on," he said.

In sum, Turnitin stands at the forefront of educational change in the region, using technology to uphold integrity and support better learning. As Thorley concluded, "The focus is very much on how can we better support customers achieve their goals with our products and how can we better spread awareness of what we're doing to the region at large."