About the Academic Honesty Collection (Part 2)…
Continuing with the collection development series (see the previous post for part 1), for this post I plan to cover electronic-based sources that provide guidance on the subject of academic integrity. Unlike the previous set of sources, the websites I have included in this segment are meant for a variety of different audiences, not just teachers and librarians. I selected one resource specifically for students because I liked the idea of having a user-friendly site to refer them to when they were doing coursework outside of the library. Another website I chose seemed to be the perfect fit for lesson planning. The remaining two sites I found were excellent places to discuss honesty ethics with like-minded scholars. Are there any websites or other electronic sources I may have missed that you feel would be a good fit for an academic honesty collection? Leave me a comment and let me know!
Key Highlights:
Website #1
Asia Pacific Forum on Educational Integrity (APFEI): http://apfei.edu.au/
The purpose of APFEI is to serve as a reference point for scholars interested in studying and preserving academic honesty at their institutions. The site has many informational resources for academics, including: a research journal, a discussion forum where scholars can discuss academic integrity topics with one another, a bibliography with reading recommendations, full access to previous conference materials, current case studies, and access to their unique, multi-disciplinary “Academic Integrity Standards” project, in which the association is attempting to create a standardized approach to forming academic honesty practices and policies.
Website #2
PlagiarismAdvice.org: http://plagiarismadvice.org/
This website is intended for individuals working in the education industry who are looking for practical advice surrounding plagiarism and information ethics. The webpage offers a variety of informational content such as a video webinar series, journal articles with advice for engaging students or creating well-written honesty policies, and teacher resources about assessment and cheating detection technology use.
Website #3
Plagiarism.org: http://www.plagiarism.org/
This website is intended for students or those who need to brush up on their citation skills. The site explains the basics of recognizing and preventing plagiarism in a series of easy-to-follow lessons. There is also an “Ask the Experts” section of the site where students have their copyright and plagiarism questions answered (for example, this month’s question is about what is considered “common knowledge” when writing a paper). The website also offers some additional resources like webcasts, additional helpful webpages, and news stories about academic honesty and current events.
Website #4
National Center for Professional and Research Ethics: Ethics Collaborative Online Resource Environment (Ethics CORE): https://nationalethicscenter.org
Ethics CORE is meant to serve as an online environment where members can post white papers, opinion pieces, encyclopedia entries, resource links, answers, and interactive lessons about topics within the area of research ethics (this includes academic honesty). The site is loosely monitored monthly to ensure only topical information is posted. Ethics CORE is meant to be a community-based group of resources that individuals can use in the classroom or as a place to turn to when attempting to solve complex ethical dilemmas via recommended best practices from scholars in the field.
Brief Reflections:
While I think that it is important to have a list of print-based sources to draw from, online sources are usually far cheaper (all of the ones I have included are free to access) and are updated more often. I also like the amount of interactivity that websites can have. Both the Ethics Core and APFEI sites have a forum where scholars from around the world can discuss solutions to complicated ethical problems together. This is part of the reason I chose to format my final project as a blog rather than, say, an informative presentation. I am hoping to prompt a discussion within the profession. I am looking forward to the experience and wisdom that other librarians can bring so that I may be able to form my own ethical opinion about how to deal with dishonesty in academia.
Discussion Questions:
Which of these websites do you think would be most useful to you in your everyday practices? Are there other web sources you use on a regular basis to help you answer ethical questions? Do you personally prefer print sources or web sources? Why?
See the entire website suggestions assignment below the cut!
Section 1: Background Information and Introduction
Most colleges in the United States have webpages that discuss their academic honesty policy. However, these are often customized to fit the institution. Additionally, it was discovered that many associations dedicated to academic integrity had a majority of their content locked behind a subscription wall (the International Center for Academic Integrity, for example). The items chosen for the website collection below were selected primarily for their ease of accessibility and their applicability to the library science field as a whole, rather than a single institution.
Section 2: Website Collection
First Website
WEBSITE NAME: Asia Pacific Forum on Educational Integrity (APFEI)
URL: http://apfei.edu.au/
WEBSITE PURPOSE:
The purpose of APFEI is to serve as a reference point for scholars interested in studying and preserving academic honesty at their institutions. The site has many informational resources for academics, including: a research journal, a discussion forum where scholars can discuss academic integrity topics with one another, a bibliography with reading recommendations, full access to previous conference materials, current case studies, and access to their unique, multi-disciplinary “Academic Integrity Standards” project, in which the association is attempting to create a standardized approach to forming academic honesty practices and policies.
JUSTIFICATION FOR SELECTION:
While this association and website is based in Australia, it appears to take an international approach to academic honesty and the site authors seem more interested in exploring commonalities in the field of ethics and academic integrity than things that set the Asia-Pacific region apart. Additionally, most of the content on the website is available to the general public for free. There did not appear to be any sort of equivalent association in the United States and the International sister-site has most of its content locked behind a paywall. The website has an impressive amount of research content in many different forms (listed above) and the fact that the association encouraged practitioner participation via a discussion board was particularly intriguing. Not only can scholars learn from the content available on the site via case studies, bibliographies, and journal articles, but they can also discuss real world issues and gain advice from their peers.
PURPOSE IN RELATION TO OTHER CHOSEN SITES:
This website allows users to look at academic honesty issues from both a philosophical and research-focused standpoint. As was discussed in the previous interview assignment, international students can often come to the classroom with a different cultural view of what academic integrity means and because librarians are now serving a wide variety of students, it is important to understand international issues and perspectives. This website provides a unique look at ethical and academic honesty issues around the world.
Second Website
WEBSITE NAME: PlagiarismAdvice.org
URL: http://plagiarismadvice.org/
WEBSITE PURPOSE:
This website is intended for individuals working in the education industry who are looking for practical advice surrounding plagiarism and information ethics. The webpage offers a variety of informational content such as a video webinar series, journal articles with advice for engaging students or creating well-written honesty policies, and teacher resources about assessment and cheating detection technology use.
JUSTIFICATION FOR SELECTION:
PlagiarismAdvice.org is a good place for a new instructional or academic librarian to start. It contains advice about designing an educational environment so that it engages students and discourages opportunities for cheating. It also provides actual case studies of approaches taken at various institutions that attempted to solve the issue of academic honesty. In this way, a librarian can learn from these examples and develop their own honesty policies and procedures.
PURPOSE IN RELATION TO OTHER CHOSEN SITES:
Unlike other resources in this paper that focus more on philosophical reasons behind cheating, this website takes a practical approach to solving dishonesty issues. The website contains advice for real-world situations (such as writing academic honesty policies or using programs like Turn-it-In to monitor students) and is written more for the everyday practitioner than it is for the ethics scholar.
Third Website
WEBSITE NAME: Plagiarism.org
URL: http://www.plagiarism.org/
WEBSITE PURPOSE:
This website is intended for students or those who need to brush up on their citation skills. The site explains the basics of recognizing and preventing plagiarism in a series of easy-to-follow lessons. There is also an “Ask the Experts” section of the site where students have their copyright and plagiarism questions answered (for example, this month’s question is about what is considered “common knowledge” when writing a paper). The website also offers some additional resources like webcasts, additional helpful webpages, and news stories about academic honesty and current events.
JUSTIFICATION FOR SELECTION:
Plagiarism.org is partnered with Turn-it-In and WriteCheck, (both digital software programs for checking for academic dishonesty.) It was founded by the same organization that created PlagiarismAdvice.org; this website, however, appears to focus more heavily on giving learners tips and tricks for avoiding plagiarism than on assisting practitioners in designing educational content. Unlike Purdue OWL which is a more prescriptive site that details specific citation styles, this website discusses the concept of plagiarism as a whole. It has a very casual approach to its design and has broken a complicated subject into very easy-to-understand terms to attract student readers.
PURPOSE IN RELATION TO OTHER CHOSEN SITES:
Rather than informing a librarian’s own practices and procedures, this website was specifically chosen to be a resource that librarians could keep in their toolkit and refer students to on a regular basis. Unlike the previous websites mentioned, this one is written in a very casual style and utilizes bright, fun colors that are meant to attract students rather than convey a professional, scholarly atmosphere.
Fourth Website
WEBSITE NAME: National Center for Professional and Research Ethics: Ethics Collaborative Online Resource Environment (Ethics CORE)
URL: https://nationalethicscenter.org
WEBSITE PURPOSE:
Ethics CORE is meant to serve as an online environment where members can post white papers, opinion pieces, encyclopedia entries, resource links, answers, and interactive lessons about topics within the area of research ethics (this includes academic honesty). The site is loosely monitored monthly to ensure only topical information is posted. Ethics CORE is meant to be a community-based group of resources that individuals can use in the classroom or as a place to turn to when attempting to solve complex ethical dilemmas via recommended best practices from scholars in the field.
JUSTIFICATION FOR SELECTION:
Ethics CORE is funded by the National Science Foundation, a reputable education-focused organization in the United States. The most compelling reason that this website was chosen was because all of the content on the site (much of it from renowned scholars in the field) is absolutely free. What is particularly interesting about this site is that users can start off by clicking on their “role” (teacher, student, etc.) in the educational process to find information that more closely meets their needs. For example, teachers will find community-created lesson plans and activities, while postdoc scholars will find discussion groups and guidance about preparing research papers. While the site focuses on research ethics in general rather than specific academic honesty topics, I was able to locate four pages worth of community-submitted content related to the term “academic integrity.” Additionally, this website has an interesting and an extensive tagging system so finding information using different search terms was fairly easy. Overall, the content available surrounding this topic was varied in nature including YouTube videos, academic policies, instructional content, research articles, and opinion pieces.
PURPOSE IN RELATION TO OTHER CHOSEN SITES:
Unlike the other websites in the collection, Ethics CORE focuses on a national (rather than international) perspective of ethics in research and is based in the United States. Also, it is the only website in the list that relies on member-created content (with a small amount of monitoring by the parent institution). While the other websites within the collection are focused on a singular topic (academic honesty), Ethics CORE provides a well-rounded overview of educational research ethics as a whole. Additionally, it seems to offer a wealth of different types of content and media. This would be an excellent source for a librarian looking for guidance from his or her peers about assisting students or faculty with extensive research projects.
Post References:
Asia Pacific Forum on Educational Integrity (APFEI). n.d. Accessed February 19, 2015. http://apfei.edu.au/.
National Center for Professional and Research Ethics: Ethics Collaborative Online Resource Environment (Ethics CORE). 2013. National Science Foundation and Engineering at Illinois. Accessed February 19, 2015. https://nationalethicscenter.org/.
Plagiarism.org. n.d. iParadigms Europe. Accessed February 19, 2015. http://www.plagiarism.org/.
PlagiarismAdvice.org. n.d. iParadigms Europe. Accessed February 19, 2015. http://plagiarismadvice.org/.
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