This is the second post in a series of two about an academic conduct symposium that I attended at the Open University between 20 March and 21 March 2013.
The difference between the first day of the conference and the second was that the first day was more focussed towards the student and the essential role of the associate lecturer. The second day (in my opinion!) seemed to be more focussed towards those who have the role of dealing with and working with academic conduct issues. Below is a brief summary of the three workshop sessions, followed by some final reflections on the whole symposium.
Student perspectives on good academic practice
Pete Smith from the Faculty of Education and Languages, was the facilitator for my first workshop of the day. This session addressed a different perspective to all the previous workshops. It aimed to ask the question: 'what is the published literature on the student perspective? [or 'views' about academic conduct]. Pete presented what was, in essence, a short literature review of the subject. I was really struck by the wealth of information that Pete presented (which means that I'm only going to pick out a number of points that jumped out at me). If you're interested in the detail of the research that Pete has uncovered (which is almost akin to a masters thesis), it might be a good idea to contact him directly.
Some key notes that I've made from the session include the point that learners can perceive themselves in terms of different roles in terms of how they relate to issue of academic conduct. There are also differences of perceived seriousness and attitudinal differences. Factors such as topic knowledge, cultural influences, demographic variables, new technology and conflicting advice are all considered to play a part.
Multiple reasons for academic misconduct range from genuine lack of understanding, attempts to gain greater levels of efficiency, temptation, cultural differences and beliefs.
When looking more deeply at the research it was commented that there was a lack of robust evidence about the success of interventions. We don't know what works, and also we don't have consistent guidance about how to begin to tackle this issue. One important perspective is that everyone is different and knowledge and understanding of a learner is needed to make the best judgement about the most approach to take.
What resources are available?
This session was facilitated by Jenny Alderman from the Open University Business School and another colleague who works in the Academic Conduct Office.
One of the reasons why academic conduct is considered to be so important is that there is an important principle of ensuring that all students are given fair and equitable treatment. Jenny reminded us that there are considerable costs in staffing the academic conduct office, running the central disciplinary and appeal committees and supporting the academic conduct officers.
An interesting debate that emerged from this session related to the efficacy of tools. Whilst tools such as TurnItIn can be useful, it is necessary to take time to scrutinise the output. There will be some clear differences between submissions for different faculties. Some more technical subject (such as mathematics) may lead to the production of assignments that are necessarily similar to one another. This has the potential to generate false positives within plagiarism detection systems.
Key resources: code of practice for student assessment, university policy on plagiarism, developing good academic practice website (which was linked to earlier), and the skills for study website which contains a section entitled developing academic English (Skills for Study).
Other resources that could be useful include Time Management Skills (Skills for Study), Writing in your own Words (Skills for Study), Use of source Materials (Skills for Study) and Gathering Materials for preparing for your assignments (Skills for Study).
The library have also produced some resources that can be useful. These include a video about avoiding plagiarism (which features 'Bob'). The library have some resources about digital literacy entitled 'being digital'. There is also a plagiarism pathway (Being Digital, Open University Library), which contains a number of activities. (At the time of writing, I hadn't seen these before - many of these resources were pretty new).
As an aside, I had some discussions with colleagues about the need to more fully embed academic English into either individual modules or programmes of study, and I was directed to a module entitled L185 English for Academic Purposes. Two fundamental challenges that need to be overcome include that of will and resource. This said, there are three sections of the L185 module that are available freely on-line through OpenLearn. These are: Paraphrasing Text, Summarising Text and How to be a Critical Reader.
Since the workshop, I've also been directed towards a resource entitled, Is my English good enough? This page contains a link to the English for OU study pages.
What works?
The final session, facilitated by Jonathan Hughes, was all about what interventions might successfully nurture good academic practice (and what we might be able to learn from student casework).
Connecting back to earlier debates surrounding the use of technology to detect plagiarism, the issue of spurious reports discussed. In instances where we are unsure what the situation was, we were reminded that the right thing to do is refer cases to the faculty academic conduct officer.
I've noted that academic conduct is an issue of education and an important part of this is sharing the university view of what plagiarism is. It is also connected with the judicious application of technology in combination with human judgement and adoption of necessary of process to ensure appropriate checks and balances. (Again, all this is from the notes that I made during the event).
During this session I remember a debate about whether it was possible to create something called a 'plagiarism proof assignment'. One contributor said, 'if you write a question, if you can do a quick internet search for an answer, then it is a poor question'. The point being that there is an intrinsic connection between academic conduct and good instructional design.
One question that arose was whether the university should be telling our students more about tools such as TurnItIn and Copycatch. Another approach is, of course, to have students submit their own work through these detection tools and also permit them to see their reports (which is an approach that other institutions adopt).
Final thoughts
This conference or symposium was very different to other conferences I've been to before. It seemed to have two (if not more) main objectives. The first was to inform other people within the university about the current thinking on the subject and to share more information about the various policies and procedures that the university employs. The second was to find a space to debate the different conceptions, approaches and challenges which come with the difficult balancing act of supporting students and policing academic conduct.
In terms of offering a space that informs and facilitates debate, I felt the conference did a good job, and I certainly feel a bit more equipped to cope with some of the challenges that I occasionally face. Moving forward, my own objective is to try my best to share information about the debates, policies and resources with my immediate colleagues.
I came away with three take away points. The first relates to the definition of what 'plagiarism' is. It now strikes me that there are almost two different definitions. One definition is the internal definition which acknowledges that students can both deliberately and inadvertently fail to acknowledge the work of others. The other more common definition is where plagiarism can be interpreted (almost immediately) as maliciously and deliberately copying someone else with the clear intention of passing someone's work off as your own. Although the difference is one that is very subtle, the second definition is, of course, much more loaded.
The second take away point lies with the policies and procedures. I now have a greater understanding of what they are and the role of the academic conduct office. I can clearly see that there are robust processes that ensure fairness in academic conduct cases. These processes, in turn, help to maintain the integrity and validity of the qualifications.
The final take away point is that I am now a lot clearer in understanding what I need to do, from my perspective, to help both students and tutors deal with different types of academic conduct.
Copies of slides and videos are now available on the Academic Conduct Site (Open University staff only)