New Lamakū Tool for Navigating AI in Student Writing: Turnitin Clarity & Upcoming Workshop

To our UHWO Faculty and Instructors:

Since ChatGPT’s release in 2022, I know many of us have faced the growing challenge of AI-generated writing in our courses, especially in writing-intensive courses, but really any course that has a writing component. I’ve spent too much time reading through “AI slop,” and I’ve heard similar frustrations from colleagues across campus.

To help us tackle this issue, I’m happy to share that our institution has subscribed to Turnitin Clarity.

Our campus has had, for several years now, the standard Turnitin product which has similarity reports. This tool would check uploaded documents against databases to have proper citation and paraphrasing with students. Clarity takes a different approach. Rather than relying only on post-submission AI detection, which usually meant developing a robust personal AI-sniff test, Clarity shifts the focus to writing process transparency.

A few other instructors and I tested Clarity in the Spring 2026 semester. While it’s not a perfect solution (no AI detection product will be), here’s where I see this tool benefiting your courses:

1. See the Writing Process
Turnitin Clarity gives students a dedicated composition workspace. Similar to how you can check the edit history in a Google Doc, Clarity tracks the entire drafting process. As an instructor, you can see how long a student spent in the document, view their edits, and identify large copy-and-paste events. If a student submits a 10-page paper but the data shows they only spent 10 minutes on it with zero revisions, you will now have a datapoint to start a conversation about authentic writing.

2. Lamakū Integration
Historically, one of the biggest points of friction with Turnitin was the setup workflow: requiring instructors to go to Turnitin.com, create a class, generate an enrollment key, and walk students through signing up. That process is gone. Turnitin Similarity and Turnitin Clarity are now embedded directly into Lamakū. You can simply add an assignment within your Lamakū course, and your students will automatically be able to access the workspace. No signup required for both yourself as an instructor or your students. The process is described in more detail here.

3. Guardrailed AI Assistant
Clarity also features a heavily guardrailed version of the AI model Claude. This allows students to chat with a language model for brainstorming or feedback, but it’s engineered not to write the paper for them. When setting up an assignment, you have a lot of control over this feature: you can customize how the chat works by adding explicit instructions to the assignment to dictate its boundaries, or disable the AI completely if you so desire.

Upcoming Workshop & Resources
To help everyone get acquainted with this tool, I’ll be leading a short workshop tomorrow via Zoom.
Wednesday, August 19th at 5:30 PM
Here’s the link go.hawaii.edu/RyR and the password is 976531

I’ve also created a dedicated LibGuide for this Turnitin Clarity, which you can access here:
https://guides.westoahu.hawaii.edu/clarity

Right now, the guide covers the basics of getting started and creating a Turnitin Clarity (or standard Turnitin) assignment within Lamakū. Tomorrow’s workshop will be recorded and added to this page, and I’ll be continually updating the guide with more resources and best practices as we continue to use the software.

I’m hopeful that Turnitin Clarity will help in your courses and give you some options in evaluating writing in the AI era. Please feel free to reach out with any questions, and I hope to see you at the workshop.

Mahalo,