Ouriginal

With educational institutions navigating the transition from learning in-person to learning online, there has been a significant rise in the need to enhance student engagement amongst students who now carry outmost of their academic coursework from their rooms’ comfort. Traversing this curve has presented educators with challenges that involve plagiarism prevention and adequate student engagement while students work on their thesis, homework, or assignments that in any way could question the student’s academic integrity. At this juncture, the merging of Urkund and PlagScan into Ouriginal gives educators an important tool to combat these challenges. By combining two award-winning services, Ouriginal provides solutions that have specifically been designed to enable educators to check for plagiarism while assessing the authenticity and originality of any document or text. This merger delivers ‘best of breed’ performance while optimizing their existing products to meet the demands of a rapidly evolving market. Ouriginal currently serves a wide gamut of customers, including corporations, schools, and universities in over 80 countries, garnering wide spread global recognition and market dominance. Leveraging cutting-edge technology such as Machine Learning, capitalizing on Urkund’s substantial database of clients, and drawing in over 20 years’ worth of experience, Ouriginal’s algorithms are refined with every iteration and growing smarter with every text analysis.

Shedding light on the company’s origins, Eric Gibbs, Ouriginal’s President for North America, says, “Urkund and PlagScan were established by people that came from an educational background and discovered there the need to protect something that is increasingly endangered by modern technologies: the freedom of every student to develop their full potential by original thinking and creative writing.”

Eric further elucidates that as the world comes to grips with the ‘new normal’, educators are on the lookout for newer Ed- Tech solutions, striving to improve student engagement and curb the ever-growing dependency on academic ghostwriters and translation services. Foreseeing these developments, Ouriginal believes that the relationships maintained with its customers will be crucial to develop newer services and solutions while serving the demands of the market.

Since Learning Management Systems (LMS) are primed to detect learning and training gaps, synthesize reports, and host online content, plagiarism prevention as an added tool—embedded within the LMS—could substantially improve users’ productivity. Interestingly, Ouriginal has an Application Programming Interface (API) that is both functional and robust, capable of easily integrating with all commercial and proprietary LMS products available in the market today. A case study published by Delaware Technical Community College on Urkund (now Ouriginal) discusses how their pursuit of a new LMS system and plagiarism prevention tool led to the adoption of Urkund’s services. The criteria were affordability, technical service level, and integration with the new LMS, and Ouriginal’s services met all of them. Highlighting Ouriginal’s ease of use and integration, Eric states, “Proof for that can be found in every aspect of the customer journey and user experience. We offer a sustainable and transparent business model that works well for customers financially and is easy to understand and forecast. Our features’ development is not driven by what our engineers could develop to make us look super-techy, but what our customers really need. We listen, we learn, we implement. It’s as simple as that.”

Foreseeing the near future, Ouriginal wants to merge both the companies from an organizational and a product perspective. On the other hand, as Ouriginal charts its course for the coming years, the aim is to use their combined talent to improve the core product while using their technology to find newer application areas – either on their own or with partners from within the Ed-Tech sector.