Ouriginal

Since time immemorial, academic misconduct has been a painful thorn in the garland of education. Students and scholars alike infringe upon written content and distinctive references of peers in an attempt to achieve quick recognition with minimal efforts. These infringements have increased even more so with the dawn of digitalization. Rubbing salt on the wound is the pandemic, which has probed educational institutions to switch to remote tutoring methodologies that require any assignments or activities to be completed online. Without any monitoring mechanism that fosters innovative thinking and combats unethical practices, educational institutions and students are taking a direct hit on their credibility and reputations. To maintain their academic integrity, organizations are looking to adopt practical tools to identify similarities between documents, provide guidance on writing, and the like.

Stepping forward to eliminate the challenge is Ouriginal, which is a fusion of two best-in-business text similarity identifying tools: Urkund and PlagScan. The core components of both the tools were merged to create an entirely new offering, capable of promoting original writing and thinking skills of individuals. Ouriginal compares a submitted file with several resource materials such as thesis, published articles, and so on, in order to ensure that each document is as authentic as possible. The tool’s ability to detect if any content was copied from a source provides a sense of relief to the original authors. The user can submit the document into the software in any file formats, which is followed by the extraction and processing of texts for similarities, thereby generating a comprehensive report with findings for the users. Ouriginal not only reviews the extent of the matches but also takes into account the substitutions made through paraphrasing and synonymizing.

As institutions shift their focus to improving the quality of learning and protecting the integrity of their content, Ouriginal plays the pivotal role of acting as a guardian of academic authenticity. “For an efficient and effective learning experience, our company enhances the academic workflow through reports and suggestions for students, teachers, instructors, and administrators,” says Andreas Ohlson, CEO of the company. As institutions generally utilize the software via the Learning Management Systems (LMS), Ouriginal has maintained a very tight integration with the LMS providers for streamlined analysis of the submitted documents. Additionally, the API allows it to be implemented onto multiple learning platforms such as moodle, Google Classroom, and more, highlighting its flexibility and versatility.

What differentiates the company from its contemporaries is its student-centric approach and the efforts undertaken to hone users’ writing and thinking skills. Ouriginal protects the intellectual property of students from being unjustly utilized by anyone else; it further helps users unlock their full potential. Moreover, the software offered by the company is language agnostic, capable of comparing content across multiple linguistic standards, thereby providing all-round and accurate results.

To substantiate, the company’s collaboration with a US-based technical community college stands as a testimony to its abilities in providing effective text similarity detection functionalities. Prior to the collaboration, the college utilized an LMS with a different embedded tool for text similarity detection. And, the effectiveness of the tool was often questioned due to a track record of faulty analysis when subjected to a high workload. These inconsistencies and the ever-increasing costs of maintaining the LMS without adequate benefits prompted the college to move to a more robust, automated, and cost-effective system with accurate plagiarism prevention functionalities. Urkund was the perfect replacement for its ability to integrate with multiple LMS and its ease of use. Apart from the ease of use, its easy-to-interpret reports were also the highlight of the implementation. The reports had in-depth pointers aimed at encouraging students to think ‘Ouriginally.’

In the near future, Ouriginal will overhaul its tools to focus more on providing learning gains along with text similarity detections. It is also aspiring to build upon a new feature, OuriginalMetrics, which provides guidance to instructors and teachers on areas of improvement.