Plagiarism Prevention: Best Practices with Urkund

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Urkund is a plagiarism prevention tool with many benefits for teachers in helping students create original work. In this blog post, I’ll share my review of this product from a company founded in 2000 and will talk about its benefits and features. Urkund is a cost-effective plagiarism prevention tool, integrates with popular LMS systems, and why it is rapidly becoming a popular tool in this area. I’ll also give you a code to receive a free trial of Urkund.

This blog post is sponsored by Urkund. All opinions are my own. Use the code COOLCAT to get a free trial of this product.

Why We Need Plagiarism Prevention Tools Like Urkund

Plagiarism is copying someone else’s material and submitting it as if it were your own.

As we work to encourage creativity and know that it is an essential skill for the modern workforce and student, we also know that there are forces at work who have infiltrated the academic system. Unfortunately, schools and universities find plagiarism prevention systems to be an essential tool to encourage the honesty we all expect from our students.

However, some plagiarism prevention systems can be expensive and don’t always work as advertised. Still, others aren’t integrated with learning management systems. Let’s look at some features that make Urkund an excellent alternative that educators should try.

1. Urkund integrates with most learning management systems, online, or by email.

I tested Urkund inside Google Classroom, however it integrates with most modern Learning Management systems including Blackboard, Moodle, and more. (See the graphic below.)

However, if you do not have an LMS, you may also have students submit work via the Urkund web portal or via email. Once submitted, you send the paper to Urkund and receive a report back like the one shown below.

2. Urkund only partners with secondary districts and post-secondary education institutions.

Unlike other plagiarism prevention tools, Urkund is only available for purchase by teachers and educational organizations — students cannot buy a license. (Note: Many educational organizations have expressed their concern about students purchasing subscriptions to these tools in an attempt to “game the system” including some of the “paper mills” and paper ghost-writing services that often contact me about advertising on my blog.)

According to Urkund, their system,

“utilizes complex machine learning and text matching algorithms to not only display matches within the document but to also identify potential text manipulation eforts by the submitter (changing fonts, inserting special characters, etc.) to deceive the system.”

Personally, I find the proliferation of the services working to advocate for dishonesty to be upsetting, but we have to stay one step ahead. Urkund’s strict adherence to their business model of selling directly to a school district or post-secondary education institution reinforces the dedication to the partnership between educational organizations and Urkund which improves plagiarism prevention.

This is important because Urkund not only searches the open Internet but the harder-to-find sources like student materials, internet content, and proprietary database content (publishers, journals, etc.) and scholarly and academic publications. (See graphic above.)

3. Urkund is the cost-effective alternative to other plagiarism prevention systems.

Education organizations need to write consistently and continually. However, as many education deans and department chairs will tell you, plagiarism checking can be expensive. As good stewards of our limited resources, and the emphasis on tightening school budgets, Urkund is the cost-effective alternative. Some schools have also found it requires much less support.

For this reason, I recommend setting up a free trial of Urkund (use the code COOLCAT to get a free trial) and contact them for a quote to see how Urkund works for you.

Disclosure of Material Connection: This is a “sponsored blog post.” The company who sponsored it compensated me via cash payment, gift, or something else of value to include a reference to their product. Regardless, I only recommend products or services I believe will be good for my readers and are from companies I can recommend. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”

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Vicki Davis

Vicki Davis is a full-time classroom teacher and IT Director in Georgia, USA. She is Mom of three, wife of one, and loves talking about the wise, transformational use of technology for teaching and doing good in the world. She hosts the 10 Minute Teacher Podcast which interviews teachers around the world about remarkable classroom practices to inspire and help teachers. Vicki focuses on what unites us -- a quest for truly remarkable life-changing teaching and learning. The goal of her work is to provide actionable, encouraging, relevant ideas for teachers that are grounded in the truth and shared with love. Vicki has been teaching since 2002 and blogging since 2005. Vicki has spoken around the world to inspire and help teachers reach their students. She is passionate about helping every child find purpose, passion, and meaning in life with a lifelong commitment to the joy and responsibility of learning. If you talk to Vicki for very long, she will encourage you to "Relate to Educate" or "innovate like a turtle" or to be "a remarkable teacher." She loves to talk to teachers who love their students and are trying to do their best. Twitter is her favorite place to share and she loves to make homemade sourdough bread and cinnamon rolls and enjoys running half marathons with her sisters. You can usually find her laughing with her students or digging into a book.

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