Effective Tools and Strategies to Promote Academic Integrity in e-Learning

Abstract

Academic integrity is one of the fundamental values that institutions must commit to uphold and to promote. This core principle is a foundation of students' achievement and growth and it also leads to good citizenship and the betterment of our society. With progressing technological tools and widely connecting of worldwide web, students can now plagiarize and cheat on their assignments with more ease. Student verification is another important issue of distance education to confirm that the person participating and receiving credits for the course is the student enrolling and doing the work. The number of university students who admit to cheating in some form is immense, and this dishonest conduct can damage schools' reputation and students' learning experience. The purpose of this study is to present effective tools and strategies used in student verification and assessment quality assurance. This paper comprises of current technology used as remote proctoring systems to verify students' identification, plagiarism software to compare students' assignments to massive databases, and applications to lockdown browsers while students take exams. The author conducted a mix of experimental and historical study by gathering data of 284 research papers using SafeAssign to check percentage (%) of matching. These papers were from 260 senior undergraduate and graduate students in the School of Technology between years 2011-2016. The Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 23.0 and Paired Samples T-test were utilized to test significant difference between variables at 95% of confidence level. Effective tools and strategies that can be used in online course development and delivery to promote academic integrity and quality assurance are assessment diversity, written assignment and threads, student verification system, plagiarism software, and lockdown browsers.