Plagiarism is a folk devil into which is poured
many of the challenges, problems and difficulties confronting higher education . This article investigates how software-
Turnitin in particular - is 'solving' a particular ' crisis' in universities . However I investigate how alternative strategies for the development of information literacy offer concrete,
productive and imaginative trajectories for university staff and students.
"In Higher Education Focus Groups and Nominal Group Technique are two well-established methods for obtaining student feedback about their learning experience. These methods are regularly used for the enhancement and quality assurance. Based on small-scale research of educational developers' practice in curriculum development, this study presents the use of a combined approach that potentially offers more benefits than the use of Focus Groups alone. It proposes a combined method, 'Nominal Focus Group', which includes the benefits of in-depth discussion of a Focus Group and the prioritising of results of Nominal Group Technique. These benefits include questions for further exploration, initial data analysis and increased ownership of the process by students. In practice, the method gave rise to rich data and actionable outcomes that were used to make informed curriculum enhancements for the programme teams."
"Leaders in assistive technology Conversor have announced that their SEN-friendly Notetalker solutions are now available for purchase and downloading. Notetalker App, combined with a Universal microphone and cable kit for any smartphone or tablet, uses a simple user interface which allows students to record classes, with the added ability to tag important information with a bookmark or a text description. Photographs can be added to the recording as a visual reminder."
"The Open University has collected and analysed student data as a means of providing information relating to student support and retention for many years. The changing landscape of higher education has seen the rapid expansion of uses to which student data is put. The Open University, in common with many other higher education institutions, is now looking at its use of learning analytics."
"The e-Assessment Toolkit exists to provide clear, current, practical information to e-assessment practitioners, or those thinking of adopting e-assessment. The toolkit offers useful tools and resources, helping users to develop and share their knowledge of e-assessment for effective implementation."
"Routledge is pleased to offer the Library & Information Science community free access to a collection of articles highlighting MOOCs and librarianship. Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are free, online classes designed to provide university-level education to a large number of students. As MOOCs become a mainstream part of higher education, libraries will play an important role in the advancement of these innovative learning opportunities."
"Welcome to Google's MOOC Kit! We're excited to provide you with a great resource that includes best practices, important tips, technology guidelines, and strategies to help you inspire and motivate students. We hope you find this information helpful when planning and designing your online course. Whether you have experience teaching online or have never taught a course before, these resources here will help guide you through the process."
"Academics often treat students' discipline-specific literacy as unproblematic. In doing so they may underestimate the difficulties for university students as they move between subjects of study that may involve different disciplines, language genres and academic practices. This paper describes an initiative aimed at supporting students in reading academic articles in preparation for completing an essay for an assessment task. This initiative involved a structured and collaborative two-week tutorial exercise that provided students with practice in using a framework to extract the main ideas from academic readings. Students were surveyed after this exercise, and their reflections of its value are described in this paper. The findings of this study will inform further stages of the project which aim to develop and investigate practical ways to develop student's academic literacy across several business disciplines."
"Objective - To describe the development and implementation of two courses designed to help university students avoid plagiarism.
Design - Quantitative and qualitative analysis.
Setting - A university in the United Kingdom.
Subjects - An unknown number of university students who took a Plagiarism Awareness Program (PAP) course between 2008 and 2011, and approximately 3,000 university students enrolled in a Plagiarism Avoidance for New Students (PANS) course delivered via a virtual learning environment (VLE) between October and December 2012. The authors attempted to collect rates of continued plagiarism among students who had taken plagiarism education courses. The authors also surveyed 702 university students about plagiarism in 2011.
Methods - Data collected from PAP participants informed revision of the authors' approach to plagiarism education and led to development of the second course, PANS. At the end of the course, students completed a test of their knowledge about plagiarism. Authors compared scores from students who took a course supervised by a librarian to the scores from students who took the course independently.
Main Results - Students reported that many aspects of citation and attribution are challenging (p. 149). The authors discovered that 93% of students who completed the PANS course facilitated by a librarian in-person passed the final exam with a grade of 70% or higher, while 85% of students who took the same course independently, without a librarian instructor, in an online VLE scored 70% or higher (p. 155). The authors report that referrals of students who plagiarized declined significantly (p-value < 0.001) since the implementation of a plagiarism avoidance curriculum.
Conclusion - As reported by the authors, first-year university students require more extensive education about plagiarism avoidance. A university plagiarism avoidance program instructed by librarians reduces the total number of students caught plagiarizing an
"The key opportunity for institutions is to take the concepts developed by the MOOC experiment to date and use them to improve the quality of their face-to-face and online provision, and to open up access to higher education. Most importantly, the understanding gained should be used to inform diversification strategies including the development of new business models and pedagogic approaches that take full advantage of digital technologies."
"Information literacy-the ability to find, evaluate and use Information effectively-is an essential skill set. The authors examine how assignments such as case analyses and research reports help business students master these abilities and provide examples of how analytic rubrics with measurable outcomes are particularly suited to assessing these skills. Also demonstrated is how librarians enhance and support student learning of Information literacy by teaching in-depth research skills. Working together, professors and librarians can give students a solid foundation in the Information-handling skills they need to be effective and productive in the workplace today."
"We're often asked for detailed information on how educators are using blogs.
The main reasons why we get these requests from educators are:
They need information to convince school administrators to allow blogging.
They are trying to work out the benefits of blogging and how blogs are used with students.
They want to know more about which blogging platforms are commonly used by educators (and why).
So last year we decided to conduct an annual survey on how educators are using blogs. Our goal is to document the trends in educational blogging."