Supporting Academic Integrity in Distance Learning

Developing Student Behaviours that Support Academic Integrity in Distance Learning

The shift to online assessment has generated debates on academic integrity, also highlighting good practice. Academic integrity is commitment to six fundamental values: honesty, trust, fairness, respect, responsibility, and courage and academic misconduct refers to practices that are not in keeping with these values and this commitment. There seem to be two dominant threads in such debates: one involves promoting creative design of authentic assessment and guidelines to students about institutional expectations concerning academic offences such as plagiarism; the other provides technological and practical safeguards to protect academic integrity. This paper reports on the outcomes of a project that evaluated the pivot to online assessment and the focus is academic integrity in distance learning environments by exploring the key themes of student and staff perceptions, and related pedagogical issues. We propose a set of measures that can enhance students’ perception of academic integrity and institutional approaches to mitigate against academic offences.