Google says Course Kit, its toolkit for teachers launched last year, will now be called Assignments and be able to detect plagiarism

VentureBeat 2019-08-15 Paul Sawers

Context & Ripple Effects

Assignments is the next step in a decade-long build-out of Google's education stack: after expanding Classroom with an API and share button in 2015 and opening it to anyone with a Google account in 2017, Google is now folding Course Kit — its toolkit for bringing assignments into schools' own sites — into the branded Assignments product with plagiarism detection added.

The timing matters: within the same week, Google relaunched the Socratic homework-helper it quietly acquired in 2018 as an AI-powered app, meaning it now ships tools on both sides of the homework equation — help doing it and detection of copied work.

First-order effects

Teachers already using Course Kit get a rebranded product, Assignments, whose new plagiarism-detection capability changes what they can check directly inside their existing workflow rather than via separate tools.
The rename pulls Course Kit under the Classroom-family branding, clarifying Google's education lineup for school administrators evaluating vendor stacks.

Second-order effects

Standalone plagiarism-detection vendors serving schools now face a rival bundled into a free, widely deployed Google-account-based suite — the same bundling logic behind reports Google planned to offer a reconfigured Classroom to businesses in G Suite.
With Socratic and Assignments both live, Google can market schools a closed loop — AI homework help plus originality checking — raising switching costs for institutions on competing platforms.

Third-order effects

If the pattern holds — Classroom API in 2015, open sign-up in 2017, business Classroom, and by 2026 Gemini-based student hubs and notebooks — Google's education products consolidate into one account-locked platform spanning learning, assistance, and assessment, narrowing the room for single-purpose edtech point tools.

The trend: Google is assembling a full-stack education platform that spans homework help, assignment management, and integrity checking, absorbing point tools into its account ecosystem along the way.

Discussion

@funnymonkey Bill Fitzgerald on x
Paired texts: “Google's algorithm for detecting hate speech is racially biased” https://www.technologyreview.com/ ... Google mining student work to detect plagiarism. https://www.blog.google/... cc @audreywatters @hypervisible
@lesleighaltmann @lesleighaltmann on x
New feature in Google Classroom! It's a free option that'll can scan student work for matched phrases across hundreds of billions of web pages and tens of millions of books. https://twitter.com/...
@betchaboy Chris Betcher on x
Something I hear often from teachers is a desire to easily check for plagiarism in student work. Starting today we now offer a new service called Originality Reports, which uses the power of Google search to find instances of non-original student work https://www.blog.google/...
@thatpsychprof Rajiv Jhangiani on x
It amuses me that faculty who require students to submit their writing to plagiarism-detection services (that mine and monetize this intellectual property) often model plagiarism in the classroom by using stolen images in slide decks (without attribution). https://twitter.com/...
@audreywatters Audrey Watters on x
Oh lovely. Google is getting into the plagiarism-detection business (like TurnItIn), which is a huge violation of students' rights and a major obstacle to a pedagogy of trust and care https://www.blog.google/...
@jenroberts1 @jenroberts1 on x
Ohhh, originality reports will work like a plagiarism checker. Students can check for themselves and teachers can check too. Many teachable moments ahead for my 9th grade writers. https://twitter.com/...
@caseynewton Casey Newton on x
Yeah but can it sense fear https://twitter.com/...

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