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Best Practices for Ensuring Academic Integrity in online learning

This brief report includes effective policies and practices used by some

educational institutions for promoting academic integrity in online learning.

In May 2009, the Instructional Technology Council (ITC 2009, p. 1)

survived its memberships to invite feedback to enhance the online learning.

The survey emphasized and aimed the following areas to be responsible and

knowledgeable for maintaining the academic integrity.

• Institutional Context and Commitment

• Curriculum and Instruction

• Faculty support

• Student support

• Assessment and Evaluation

In the academic integration, the educational institutions are mostly seen

involving and informing faculty members and students about the relevant

issues. An interesting finding is that,

…. 52% students indicated that they obtained integrity information

from the institutions website while nearly 48% indicated that they did

not. 8% (Spaulding, 2009, p.195).

The University of Medicine & Dentistry (UMDN) of New Jersey in 2007

recommended 7 academic integrity practices. They are: having clear and

consistent policies and practices, educating entire community, rigorous

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practice from top to bottom, clear approaches to academic violations,

development of academic integrity, be alert in higher technological

education, and regular assess to check the effectiveness of policy and

procedures. UMDN (2007) and WCET(2009) stressed on the similar

approaches to the academic integrity as focusing on the policies and

procedures. According to best practices in academic integration at UMDNJ,

the unique characteristics of policies and procedures are included as follows:

• Code of academic integrity,

• Honor code,

• A code of professional conduct,

• Emphasis on positive behaviors and expectations,

• Clear instruction,

• Tracking mechanism to identify students with repeated violations of

academic integrity policy

• Evaluation mechanism, orientation to students on the issues,

• Student honesty declarations on paper and exam are highly

considered.

A research conducted by Michael Spaulding of the University of Tennessee

entitled, Perceptions of Academic Honesty in Online vs. Face-to Face

Classrooms claims that the Black board features offer safeguards to help

eliminate some of the problems involving academic integrity (p. 183). The

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safeguard process generally becomes active while using the Respondus that

locks the user’s browser and limits the Internet access to further

information. In addition, it seems that the Blackboard contains plagiarism

detection systems software what the educational institutions use.

As general practices if academic integration, Spaulding (2009)

encourages to understand the perceptions of students toward academic

dishonest that would help preserve the academic integration. So, the

findings strongly suggest that a majority of existing research in AI tends to

focus on a top-down approach!

For example, McCabe et al. (2001) claimed that most of the academic

behaviors of students are the result of the institution’s honor codes and

Academic Integrity (AI) programs. The finding also argued that a joint effort

of staffs and students helps to create and implement academic honesty

policies (2009, p.196).

In summary, educational institutions have policies and AI maintaining

strategies through different doors. The defined policies, practices and

principals established for the AI, if learned and applied together by all

subordinating people (faculty, students, and stakeholders), the inclusive

shared responsibilities would preserve the online learning AI. The AI is a

multi-pronged approach.

References:

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http://www.ncolr.org/jiol/issues/pdf/8.3.1.pdf http://jolt.merlot.org/vol5no2/mcnabb_0609.pdf http://www.creighton.edu/sites/www.creighton.edu/files/group-basic-page/group-basic-page-file/DistanceTeachingStandards_6_17_13_0.pdf http://www.bakersfieldcollege.edu/distance_learning/instructor/Academic_Integrity_Online_Courses_cclf.pdf http://rbhs.rutgers.edu/rwjlbweb/meg/docs/Best_Practices_AI.pdf