Introducing Ouriginal: An Authoritative European Voice in the Fight Against Plagiarism

03 Sep 2020

The combined expertise, knowledge and innovation of these two Education Technology leaders promises to benefit educational institutions globally.

Ouriginal, the fusion of Europe’s leading text matching solutions is announcing its official launch today. The new EdTech company is formed from the synthesis of Urkund and PlagScan, two established and trusted names in plagiarism detection. Combining expertise spanning decades, the award-winning software solutions are designed to enable educators and other users to assess the authenticity and originality of any text. The new organization offers the scale and structure to better respond to the growing needs of education and research globally. With a proven culture of high performance and cutting-edge technology, Ouriginal promises to take academic integrity to new levels, encouraging and fostering everyone’s original voice. 

 

Digital Sharing and Time Deficiency Pose a Real Threat to Academic Integrity

The emergence of an interconnected and global digital economy poses significant challenges to student literacy.  Billions of digital content sources are openly and freely available to learners for use in research, whether it be a simple homework task, university assignments, PhD thesis or a political speech. Additionally, with limited time and enormous availability of information, ghostwriters and essay mill services have emerged as a huge business and growing problem for educators.

“Many students are not aware that by not writing assignments themselves, they are ultimately harming their education. They are losing out on chances in life through developing their own original way of thinking and writing”, says Andreas Ohlson, CEO of Ouriginal. “Checking submissions manually is very time-consuming, so educators often refrain from it, or only check ‘suspicious’ texts. While it is understandable, it also creates an ‘unfair’ learning environment.”

Ouriginal Frees Up Time and Enables Educators to Focus on Students, Not Their Text

Learning Management Systems (LMS), are the educator’s toolbox and dashboard in today’s teaching environment. With remote learning becoming the new "normal", institutions are increasingly challenged in student development, academic integrity and the quality of the students’ learning experience. Seamless integrations between technology solutions has become vital for teaching and learning. Ouriginal understands this challenge and is committed to partnerships with technology providers that require our expertise. Ouriginal is seamlessly integrated into all major LMS and a growing number of e-learning tools.

“In my experience an effective e-learning solution shouldn’t be invasive or rigid. It needs to work within the ecosystem that drives the operation. It should be flexible, scalable, easy to use, and definitely shouldn’t hijack the workflow,” continues Andreas Ohlson. “At Ouriginal we work closely with our LMS and e-learning partners to ensure that our expertise fills their gaps, and leads to smart integrations and happy end-users.”

About Ouriginal

Ouriginal is a text-matching software used to assess the originality of any given text. It was born out of the fusion of PlagScan and Urkund with the goal to offer a bold solution that enhances students' potentials to think original and saves teachers time evaluating assignments. With more than 3 decades of combined knowledge and expertise, we deliver cutting-edge technology, catering to our customers' needs. Currently, Ouriginal provides its services to more than 7,700 organizations in over 80 countries through its three offices in Sweden, Germany, and the USA, as well as its over 100 partners worldwide.

 

For more information about Ouriginal, please write to enquiry@edutech.com.