Some users may be receiving a message reading “Error communicating with Turnitin.  Try to resubmit the file.  If this issue persists, contact your administrator”.  If you are seeing this error message, please make sure that you have both a start date AND end date set on your Dropbox in Desire2Learn.  Once you have set the start and end date, the issue should be resolved and you can resubmit the file.

Warning – Technical explanation below:

With the new Turnitin integration, the way default dates work has been slightly changed.  There are actually two separate date settings in play.  First, there are the settings that you can create on the Dropbox – start date, end date and due date.  Second, there are dates behind the scenes with Turnitin that are calculated based on the settings you choose for the Dropbox.

We have recently discovered that if you create a Dropbox that does not have any start date or end date, the end date that is configured with Turnitin is set to 8 days from the current date.  What this means, is that even though the Dropbox is always open, papers will not submit to Turnitin after that 8 day period, and will cause an error to display inside of Desire2Learn when you are trying to review the papers.

Luckily, in order to fix this issue, you simply need to set a start date and end date on the Dropbox.  Once these are set, the dates will be updated in Turnitin also which will allow you to resubmit the files.  Desire2Learn is working on adjusting this logic for a future release.  In the mean time, we highly suggest that you create both a start date and end date when creating a Dropbox that user Turnitin to avoid this problem.

Table Source: https://community.brightspace.com/blogs/product/turnitin_date_management

If you have any questions regrading this, please contact UW-W Desire2Learn Support.