“Ctrl-C – Ctrl-V” “Copy and Paste” “A Modern-Day Research Paper” In the online classroom, one issue that instructors are constantly battling is plagiarism. In today’s digital age, where “Googling” is a verb that provides an abundance of information in seconds, plagiarism is more rampant than ever before.
All too often, students are lifting information from websites and utilizing it as their own within their discussion questions, research papers, and assignments. The internet also hosts numerous websites that will complete papers on almost any topic – for a generous fee, of course.
For online students who are busy juggling multiple rolls with their education, sometimes utilizing a paper mill or taking information from a website seems like a quick and easy way to complete an assignment quickly. However, most online schools have strict plagiarism policies, which result from everything to a zero on the assignment to expulsion. For most students, it isn’t a risk that is worth taking.
Online colleges have implemented a variety of resources to help instructors quickly and easily identify instances of plagiarism. One example is TurnItIn.com, which is utilized by many schools to collect papers and compare them against websites and other students’ work.
According to TurnitIn.com, the site hosts more than 350 million student papers and is growing by 200,000 papers daily. They also utilize 24 billion websites and 110 million articles to compare student work. This resource is invaluable as instructors can upload a paper and know within seconds if students are plagiarizing. Many schools allow students to upload their work into it directly – which allows the student to see before the paper is even submitted the same plagiarism results that will be viewed by the instructor.
Besides utilizing Turnitin.com, online instructors are becoming more creative in their creation of assignments – making it more difficult for students to plagiarize. Many courses break the major assignments – such as the final research paper – into several assignments throughout the course. For a research paper, the course might break this down into five separate assignments – a topic proposal, an annotated bibliography, a preliminary introduction and conclusion, a draft of the paper, and the final paper itself.
While students could still utilize another student’s paper (hoping it’s not already been submitted to TurnItIn.com) or could purchase a paper from one of the numerous paper mills available, this becomes much more difficult when the student is held accountable for the material throughout the course, instead of just for the individual paper.
Despite this, some students are still not aware of the nuances of plagiarism – such as properly citing sources, quoting and paraphrasing correctly and accurately, etc. Many schools are teaching these topics briefly in orientation level courses, but more is needed to help students improve these skills and improve their writing overall.
Have you ever plagiarized? What more can online instructors do to stop plagiarism at the college level?
About the Author
Jamie Weitl is a WAHM teaching for several online universities and raising three precocious little ones. In her spare time she enjoys writing, baking, and running. For more info, see my Google Plus Profile.
