Catching Lightning in a Bottle: Surveying Plagiarism Futures

Online Learning Consortium, Inc. P.O. Box 1238, Newburyport, MA 01950. Tel: 888-898-6209; Fax: 888-898-6209; e-mail: [email protected]; Web site: https://olj.onlinelearningconsortium.org/index.php/olj/index

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18

Plagiarism; Integrity; Higher Education; College Students; Electronic Learning; Information Dissemination; Prevention; Online Courses; Distance Education; Internet; Web Sites; Incidence

2472-5749

The digitization of higher education is evolving academic misconduct, posing both new challenges to and opportunities for academic integrity and its research. The digital evidence inherent to onlinebased academic misconduct produces new avenues of replicable, aggregate, and data-driven (RAD) research not previously available. In a digital mutation of the misuse of unoriginal material, students are increasingly leveraging online learning platforms like CourseHero.com to exchange completed coursework. This study leverages a novel dataset recorded by the upload of academic materials on CourseHero.com to measure how at-risk sample courses are to potential academic misconduct. This study's survey of exchanged coursework reveals that students are sharing a significant amount of academic material online that poses a direct danger to their courses' academic integrity. This study's approach to observing what academic material students are sharing online demonstrates a novel means of leveraging digitized academic misconduct to develop valuable insights for planning the mitigation of academic dishonesty and maintaining course academic integrity.

As Provided

2021

EJ1320182