Thursday, April 23, 2015

ELCC 2015 Conferencef: Short thoughts on Academic Integrity.



I recently attended the eLearning Consortium of Colorado’s conference in Breckenridge. I went for one day and due to the fact that it happened to be same day we got our wonderful spring storm, my attendance was limited, but I did manage to catch Heather Tobin ‘s presentation on Academic Honesty. Heather, an Instructional Designer at the University of Denver and an adjunct instructor for CCCOnline, provided several strategies for reducing the possibility of cheating.
1.   Examine your syllabus, where in your course might students be most tempted or most capable of succeeding at cheating.
§  Once identified find new ways of assessing these activities that will reduce or eliminate the cheating.
2.   Build a culture of academic integrity in your course.
§  One attendee shared that he has the students sign an oath pledging not to cheat. As a practice this gives a point of discussion if cheating does occur and helps remind students that you do care.
§  Heather mentioned that just discussing it as a group brings cheating out of the shadows and gives students a chance to hear how the others feel about it.
3.   Utilize Turnitin to assist students with checking rough drafts.
§  Regis University has an enterprise license of Turnitin and it is available online and it WorldClass for all instructors.
§  Encourage students to submit drafts for analysis to see where they might be plagiarizing.
§  Use Turnitin as teaching tool for students.
§  This will give students experience with the tool you may be using to evaluate them before they are graded with it.
                                                                  
I’m pretty certain that some if not all of these are known and used by many faculty, however a review of good ideas never hurts. Hope it is helpful.

No comments:

Post a Comment