eGalactic is one of the leading providers of plagiarism detection systems, simulations, and Learning Management Systems to the Indian higher education system. With a customer base of more than 1500+ Indian universities and institutes, the company has been deeply rooted in the Indian education system for more than a decade. eGalactic’s range of products are used by more than 10,000+ customers globally.
eGalactic realized that to meet their core objective of helping faculty and institutions improve the overall quality of education in India, the critical issue of plagiarism will need to be addressed.
“Plagiarism is inherent in the education system and the ideal way to address it is bottom-up,” says Mr. Prakash Sarda, co-founder of eGalactic. He goes on to add – “As eGalactic, we are focussed on improving the quality of higher education. We strongly recommend that the first assignments of students should be run through a plagiarism detection system at every level of education. Spreading awareness about plagiarism and providing adequate training is equally important to address the problem.”
eGalactic partnered with Ouriginal (a text-matching system that combines the expertise of Urkund and PlagScan), in 2015 to win a global tender for all government-funded universities in India. The services were rolled out to 200+ universities for a period of three years. eGalactic and Ouriginal were selected again in 2018 to offer plagiarism detection services to these universities.
In 2019, eGalactic and Ouriginal won another global tender for a plagiarism detection system for universities and Centrally Funded Technical Institutes in India.
Easy to use and flexible
“Very easy to use and implement, with an intuitive interface” were some of the main reasons that helped Ouriginal stand out among the other products.
“Ouriginal was also flexible and offered to adapt the tool as per the market’s needs,” notes Prakash. This convinced him and eGalactic that they could meet the expectations of their customers via Ouriginal and that it was the right value proposition for the market.
Quick on-boarding and user set-up
For eGalactic, its partnership with Ouriginal has been exciting and rewarding. Looking back, Prakash notes with incredulity and pride; “In 2019, Ouriginal was seamlessly rolled out to 1045 universities in India, spread across five locations over a span of two weeks.”
Says Prakash, “Getting all these people on board in such a short time with no hiccups was incredible!”
The partnership and why Ouriginal works
When we asked Prakash to share some insights on what he thinks makes Ouriginal better and more suitable as a tool when compared to others in the market, his prompt response was – “The system is designed very smartly and into simple sub-systems. The entire system is never down even if there are issues in certain areas; there is no single point of failure. Ouriginal is most unique in that sense and its uptime has been one of the best in the industry.”
Prakash also feels that Ouriginal does a great job in finding quality and relevant matches and reducing false positives. “The system focuses on finding quality and relevant text-matches without just trying to cover all possible matches which can often lead to false positives.”
But what has really sealed eGalactic and Ouriginal’s partnership is that Ouriginal as a company is more focused on the larger issue of academic integrity rather than just plagiarism. Says Sarda, “It doesn’t sell to students/individuals or ghost writers. From the beginning, Ouriginal has been very focused and driven in promoting academic integrity; and this broader objective fits in very well with our philosophy of trying to improve the overall quality of education.”
“We strongly believe that Ouriginal is one tool that can make the most difference in terms of the quality of education that is being imparted. And it helps us address the basic purpose of education, which is learning.”