Hosting academic integrity events: What can you do with academic integrity at your college or university?

Over the past year, the importance and intricacies of academic integrity (AI) in higher education have been thrust to the forefront of discussion. This has caused some institutions to change the way they approach well-established AI initiatives, while others see opportunities to establish their first events. Join practitioners from two Manitoba institutions for a look at how their AI events are organized and why, for both college and university settings, and for stakeholders ranging from students to administrators. Attendees will learn about different approaches to hosting AI activities, how these initiatives evolve over time, and considerations for creating and contextualizing your own AI events

An Officer and a Strategist: A Panel of Academic Integrity Professionals

The concept of academic integrity in post-secondary institutions has many faces. It can be considered as a lack of student ethics to be dealt with by policy when the time comes. As something that instructors are expected to unilaterally maintain within their own classrooms. As an institutional norm, or as an impossible utopia. Without a national quality assurance body to inform their efforts, Canadian colleges and universities can look to England and Australia for guidance on academic integrity. The Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) and Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency (TEQSA) guide both of these countries respectively, while providing a wealth of information to those living and working elsewhere, including Canada. In 2020, QAA recommended that institutions designate the coordination of academic integrity to new or existing positions within post-secondary institutions. There remains, however, “limited opportunities for formalized training for academic integrity” (Vogt & Eaton, 2022, p.24). As such, Canadians working in post-secondary academic integrity come from diverse areas and disciplines, including academic support units, libraries, student advocacy, test centres, and many others. Some work is done off the side of desks, while some institutions have academic integrity offices with specialized staff. In this moderated panel session, academic integrity practitioners and professionals from various Canadian institutions will reflect on their work and the future of academic integrity in Canadian colleges and universities, deepening current understandings and providing a vision for others.&nbsp

Creative evaluation: A Constellation of Approaches toward the Future of Academic Integrity

With academic integrity anchored in teaching and learning (Bertram Gallant, 2016), perhaps its future could be positively influenced by more creative evaluation processes and methods. In this interactive presentation, members of Assiniboine Community College’s (ACC) Learning Commons share the value of designing and developing creative evaluations which maintain academic integrity in the evaluation process and align to college standards. With omnipresent concerns about academic misconduct spanning higher education, course and assessment design remain a way to prevent and reduce its occurrence through already established pedagogical strategies. The multidisciplinary team of ACC’s Library Manager, Education Quality Assurance Specialist, and Instructional Designer will facilitate an exploration of creative evaluation that can be achieved by using a constellation of approaches. This exploration is based primarily on the works of creative evaluation from Christou et al. (2021) and assessment for inclusion by Tai et al. (2022). Participants will leave with an understanding of what creative evaluations are and look like, and how to move towards designing and developing them at their own institutions

Preventing online shopping for completed assessments: Protecting students by blocking access to contract cheating websites on institutional networks

Contract cheating or “the outsourcing of student work to third parties” (Lancaster & Clarke, 2016, p. 639) is a type of academic misconduct that is growing and changing due to advancements in technology and the emergence of a lucrative, multi-million dollar per year industry that targets students relentlessly (Lancaster & Clarke, 2016). In an effort to protect students from engaging in contract cheating, three postsecondary institutions in Manitoba (i.e., Assiniboine Community College, Red River College, and the University of Manitoba) launched initiatives to block access to websites that offer contract cheating services from their networks. This initiative facilitated a preliminary examination of student activity on institutional networks. In any given month, a relatively large number of students (i.e., up to 3,519 unique users) were attempting to access websites identified as providing contract cheating services. We recognize that a single initiative will not eliminate academic misconduct, however, by combining various educational, protective, and preventative strategies, the likelihood that students will make ethical decisions regarding their academic work can be increased

Academic Integrity Policy Analysis of Alberta and Manitoba Colleges

Dealing with matters related to academic integrity and academic misconduct can be challenging in higher education. As a result, students, educators, administrators, and other higher education professionals look to policy and procedures to help guide them through these complex situations. Policies are often representative of an institution’s culture of academic integrity. For these and other reasons it is therefore important that policies and procedures are reviewed regularly and updated to ensure that they align with current educational expectations and societal context. In this presentation, we share the results from our policy analysis of 16 colleges in the Canadian western provinces of Alberta and Manitoba. Data extraction and analyses were performed using a tool developed based on Bretag et al.’s five core elements of exemplary academic integrity policy. Our results showed inconsistencies in college polices in terms of the intended audience for the documents (e.g., students, faculty, administrators), varying levels of detail, inconsistent definitions, or categories of misconduct (e.g., plagiarism, cheating) and little mention of contract cheating. We compare the results of this study with previous academic integrity policy research in Canada for colleges in Ontario (Stoesz et al., 2019), as well as universities (Miron et al., 2021; Stoesz & Eaton, 2022). We also discuss the recent increase in the use of artificial intelligence tools such as ChatGPT and GPT-3 and what this could mean in the context of academic integrity policy. We conclude with recommendations for policy reform in the Canadian college context. Our findings may be useful to those working in community colleges and polytechnics elsewhere

Creating a Collaborative Network to Promote Cultures of Academic Integrity in Manitoba’s Post-Secondary Institutions

In this article, we, as representatives from several post-secondary institutions across Manitoba and British Columbia, describe how sharing knowledge and experiences across institutions has informed and enhanced academic integrity initiatives at our respective institutions. We outline how participation in provincial, national, and international teaching and learning events as a collective has informed our work in academic integrity and led to the emergence of the Manitoba Academic Integrity Network (MAIN) in May 2019. We discuss the benefits of collaborating within a provincial network and next steps for expanding the reach of the network across institutions by engaging faculty, staff, and students

It Takes a Village: A Multi-Institution, Multi-Role Panel on Contract Cheating

Members of the Alberta Council on Academic Integrity (ACAI) Contract Cheating Working Group will discuss how the collective, multi-institutional nature of their work has helped to provide practical interventions for contract cheating (Clarke & Lancaster, 2006), addressing in particular this mode of misconduct's multilateral and predatory nature. Student academic misconduct in post-secondary education and research has predominantly been understood to be perpetrated by individuals undertaking unilateral action (Eaton et al., 2019). We can observe this, for example, in how motives for academic misconduct tend to be studied in psychological, sociological, or criminological terms (e.g. Rundle et al., 2019) while the ‘supply side’ (Medway et al., 2018) and structured nature (Grue et al., 2021) of contract cheating requires more exploration. Contract cheating undermines the expectation of unilateral action by virtue of its multilateral (i.e. contractual) nature, involving networks of suppliers and consumers, thereby complicating the relationship between the perpetrator and the act of misconduct and frustrating efforts to make meaningful interventions. Addressing contract cheating takes a village. Through the lens of diversified roles and from the perspectives of multiple post-secondary institutions, panel members will discuss how to engage contract cheating collectively, provide specific and concrete projects they have collaboratively undertaken to address contract cheating issues – including videos and other digital resources – and discuss recent, instructive contract cheating cases. Participants will have access to situated insights, experiences, and resources to take away and use as-is or adapt to their own needs

Where there's smoke: The library's role in bibliographic analysis of academic misconduct

Literature from many disciplines has, for years, called for library involvement in academic integrity. More recently, it has been suggested that libraries and those working in them are well-suited to assist in detecting plagiarism. At the same time, literature specific to quality in academic libraries has emphasized the development of and focus on services, and what libraries do rather than what they have. With this in mind, and with academic integrity in its portfolio, the Library at Assiniboine Community College has added a new service to the identification stage of its holistic approach to academic integrity. Combining existing resources on bibliographic forensics, text-matching software, and discovery interviews, it allows for the library to leverage its unique knowledge of available resources in identifying academic misconduct.   Learning Outcomes Summarize frameworks and resources that inform this service Examine opportunities for libraries in performing bibliographic analysis related to potential academic misconduct cases Reflect on the implementation and evaluation of this servic

Academic integrity in Canada: An author panel for this important new book

“Academic integrity in Canada: an enduring and essential challenge” is an open-access book recently published by Springer as part of the series “Ethics and Integrity in Educational Contexts”. Edited by scholars Sarah Elaine Eaton and Julia Christensen Hughes, it contains over 600 pages in 31 chapters designed to address the gap in Canada’s study and evidence-based recommendations involving academic integrity. The book is divided into five sections: Canadian context, emerging and prevalent forms of academic misconduct, integrity within specific learning environments and professional programs, barriers and catalysts to academic integrity: multiple perspectives and supports, and institutional responses. In this moderated panel session, several chapter authors as well as Sarah Elaine Eaton will delve into specific aspects of their contributions towards the book. Through the open question and discussion segment, attendees will be inspired to contribute in their own institutional roles towards provincial and, ultimately, the growing Canadian academic integrity community. Learning Outcomes Discuss academic integrity culture and initiatives in Canada Identify ways to make contributions towards academic integrity in various roles and institutions Reflect on specific aspects of academic integrity covered in individual chapter