Plagiarism in the Online Environment

·  What plagiarism detection software is available to online instructors?

In my experience, unfortunately, online students DO cheat.  There are many software companies that specialize in creating programs that will help detect plagiarism.  For example, Turnitin.com looks online through search engines and can even populate results within its own database in a company for all papers scanned previously.  Another is EVE (Essay Verification Engine), but it is not as widely used.  Another way to search for academic dishonesty is to just do a free Google search.  Copy and paste in parts that seem suspicious and see what Google brings up (Jacoy & DiBiase, 2006)

·  How can the design of assessments help prevent academic dishonesty?

Assessments need to use higher order thinking questions in order to avoid academic dishonesty.  When you have students recalling information from the content only, you are running the risk of them Googling the answers.  If you have them writing their opinions and then providing evidence from the content to back up their responses, it is harder for them to cheat.  Also, creating questions that are new and somewhat different from time-to-time keeps the students on their toes and never able to find the definitive answer.

·  What facilitation strategies do you propose to use as a current or future online instructor?

In the video presentation, it was suggested that we create collaborative assignments, which will help negate “cheating” in the technical sense (Palloff & Pratt).  However, I think that I would just rather include instruction on plagiarism up front to my students to help prevent it.  According to the study performed by Jocoy and DiBiase (2006), though, it didn’t seem to reduce plagiarism significantly.  I think I will create a short quiz/survey, like they did, to assess student understanding to see if they understand the basics though.

·  What additional considerations for online teaching should be made to help detect or prevent cheating and plagiarism?

I think that instructors need to keep in mind that students do cheat – even in the online sector.  Even though we do not SEE it in person, we have to understand how readily information can be found on the Internet.  We always need to keep on top of all the new technologies our students are using (like Yahoo! Answers) and report when we can to remove this information.  We are on the front line battling online plagiarism and must not only educate, but remove poor sources.

Resources

Jocoy, C., & DiBiase, D. (2006). Plagiarism by adult learners online: A case study in detection and remediation. International Review of Research in Open & Distance Learning, 7(1), 1–15.

Video: “Plagiarism and Cheating” (approximate length: 10 minutes).
Dr. Palloff and Pratt discuss effective methods for dealing with plagiarism in distance education.