A number of our professors use Turnitin to check originality of student papers. Turnitin helps to compare student work with its repository of student papers, as well as online sources.
What if students have cited every source properly, but the sources they cited from are not good sources?
Check the following video made by University of Mary Washington’s New Media Center about the CRAAP test (currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, and purpose) that can be applied to check the quality of online sources.
If you use rubrics in your teaching, it is a good idea to develop a rubric to share this test, and apply the rubric to evaluate their bibliographies.
University librarians should also be able to help students evaluate online sources. Laura Baker, ACU’s Digital Research and Scholarship Librarian provides this helpful page for evaluating online web sites. The library website also has many databases students will find useful.
If you have some additional ways to teach students about quality online sources, please share in comments.