Promoting Academic Integrity in Online Courses

Author: Phil Chambers | May 28, 2021 Academic Integrity

This post is a reflection on changes to course development that I have made after attending various sessions at a recent Academic Integrity conference. The idea behind these changes is to make academic integrity not just a concept students should understand, but to strategically weave the it throughout a course with well placed reminders, connections to upcoming assignments, and informative scenarios based on prior academic misconduct data.

How academic integrity is usually handled 

A lot of the time, when an institution like a university has an academic integrity component for students, it is found inside some official-sounding document like: a student code of conduct, a student contract, or other such legal imitation that students have to agree to so they can participate at the university/course/etc. Of course, often being young students, it is unlikely that they are going to read these documents fully, and with great care. It is even less likely that they will fully understand the implications and then disagree with the articles within and withdraw their enrollment at the college.

What tends to happen, as I have gathered through my experience as an academic program manager, is that students read the document (or not), agree to it (even without reading), and then some of them proceed to violate the academic code of conduct, either willingly or by accident. In the accidental case, which may be treated just as harshly as a purposeful violation depending on the instructor/admin, students may be from cultures where the concept of academic misconduct is either non-existent, ignored, or treated entirely differently.

What is our aim with these academic integrity policies? 

Take a step back for a second and consider your own institution’s policies on Academic Integrity or Academic Misconduct. How much of it is intended to inform the learner on how to avoid the pitfalls of certain misconduct issues, and how much of it outlines the severity of violating said policies? If the common practice is to simply provide a list of issues (like cheating, plagiarism, etc.) with a list of punishments for each one, is this really helping your learners to understand how to improve their academic integrity? Is it even helping to reduce the number of misconduct violations at your institution? Perhaps a deeper dive into the intended outcomes - and how to achieve them - is required.

The Human Readable Approach 

I have been a teacher, instructor, and program manager in schools, colleges and universities around the world. Taking a step back from all of these different posts, and considering the academic integrity policies and goals put in place institutionally, I cannot think of many cases where the idea was to educate students on a deeper level about how and why these policies exist. The emphasis was often far more skewed towards the punishments for violating policies than to work with students to prevent the issue before it surfaced.¹

Watch your language 

Let’s pause for a minute to address the vocabulary associated with these codes of conduct. Here are some of the words that I see coming up again and again:

• Misconduct
• Punishment
• Violation
• Prohibited

Pick whatever academic integrity document you have - chances are these words and more are in there somewhere. Now they are perfectly fine for describing all of the issues a student who violates the rules will face but what if we start looking at it from a different angle? What if we make a human-centered version of these rules that are easy to read, at a glance, and frequent enough throughout the course that by the time the student gets to the end of it, these become second nature to them just by looking at an icon. Then when they move on to the next class, the same integration of integrity rules and assessments would be applied as well.

The Basic Requirements 

To put this into practice, here is what I need to create:

1. A list of the institution’s misconduct violations and their meanings, in a more human readable form.
2. A set of icons that, at a glance, reveal to students which potential issues might arise. These can then be attached to a relevant assignment.

Requirement 1 

To accomplish the first requirement, the first thing that springs to mind would be some sort of dedicated page in the initial or welcome module of the course. Instructors may want to set up the learning management system to require this page be read - or add a question or two to the syllabus quiz that is often found in the first week. This would put the concept of academic integrity on the radar, but alone this runs the risk of being forgotten about after the first few weeks as the main assignments start piling up.

Requirement 2 

The second requirement would seek to solidify the concept of academic integrity in the learners' minds by creating a set of icons, linking back to the detailed page of misconduct violations, and attaching them all assignment pages.

How you would handle this going foward could take many forms. For example:

Other Considerations 

Avoid information overload 

You might want to avoid including all potential academic violations at once on every assignment - that would defeat the purpose of creating this new approach. Instead, instructors could research which misconduct violations have occurred historically for the assignment (and those similar to it), so they can identify the most likely student mishaps. For example, if the task involves group work, this would be a great opportunity to remind students about sharing files/essays vs working together in a group setting. One of these is positive and should be encouraged; the other is a major issue for educational institutions.

Who are my learners? 

Also consider the expected learner profiles. Are you likely to have international students on your course? If so, the idea of what constitutes academic misconduct may be entirely new to them, or considered less (or more) serious than you initially expect within your educational context. Some students may be genuinely surprised by how much is not permitted when it comes to academic integrity. This is even more reason to set up expectations at the start of the course and give clear guidance throughout the assessment process.

These could be accompanied by examples of how students have been caught out before and what to avoid. Remember, it might be obvious to seasoned academics, but not to someone taking the class for the first time.

Examples of ‘at a glance’ icons 

I am a big fan of simple, easy to understand and distinguish iconography. It helps to quickly establish ideas and link back to key information. A great example of this is how the Creative Commons “human readable” licenses work.

Creative Commons licenses give everyone from individual creators to large institutions a standardized way to grant the public permission to use their creative work under copyright law. From the reuser’s perspective, the presence of a Creative Commons license on a copyrighted work answers the question, “What can I do with this work?”
Creative Commons, CC BY

For example:

This is the Creative Commons icon for ‘noncommercial’, and once you learn the human readable meaning of this icon, you instantly know how you can use content with this restriction.

Keep it simple 

When you come to making your own callouts, icons, or however you believe this might work for your own purposes, remember to keep them simple and easy to understand. In my previous example of group work vs ‘helping’ by sharing drafts or key files, this could fall under ‘Assisting’, or ‘Plagiarism’, depending on the exact violation. If we believe it classes as assisting, then we should include:

1. appropriate and obvious imagery.
2. a small (human readable) reminder in a few sentences to remind students what ‘assisting’ is.
3. an example of how students have made mistakes with this assignment in the past.

I would not advise taking up too much screen space with this. Your interpretation will vary depending on the Learning Management System you are using for your courses, and there is the potential to get fancy with the look and feel of this if you are up to it! The main point here is to have obvious callouts to flag the most common academic misconduct violations before they happen, and to cement these ideas in the minds of your students.

Conclusion 

My experimentation at this is ongoing, and this is not something that one designer/developer should do by themselves. It requires input and assistance from subject matter experts (or perhaps the department of the college/university you are working with) to succeed. It is unlikely you would know all the potential issues with a certain assignment by yourself, or have access to all the historical misconduct data to create the meaningful information required to give assignment-specific violations that could help students consider how they are working on an assignment.

It will be a while before I can see the impact of including this kind of information on an assignment level.

Next Steps… 

I will return to this post in the future with an update on which approach I took and how it has been received. Stay tuned!