Developing Student Behaviours that Support Academic Integrity in Distance Learning

Abstract

The shift to online assessment during the pandemic has generated debates on academic integrity, also highlighting good practice in supporting students and staff. 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 in higher education: one involves promoting creative design of authentic assessment and guidelines to students about institutional expectations concerning academic offences such as plagiarism and collusion; the other provides technological and practical safeguards to protect academic integrity. In this paper, we report on the outcomes of a project that evaluated in 2020 the pivot to online assessment at the University of London, UK. Our 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.