Search

Increasing pressure is being placed on governments and legislators in different countries to take action against assignment outsourcing in higher education. Global discussions focus on prohibiting commercial outsourcing providers, such as contract cheating services. Despite evidence to suggest that outsourcing behaviours by students are increasing, and the number/reach of companies is increasing, little research has been undertaken to explore whether legislation will deter or prevent students from engaging in these dishonest behaviours. We investigated the issue of legality with higher education students, asking about their peers and their own assignment outsourcing behaviours, whether they believed such companies were already illegal, or whether they thought they should be illegal. Using quantitative analysis, responses from 7126 international participants were considered. We found that some students outsourced their assignments whether they thought it was illegal or not. Further, the majority of respondents argued that students should be impacted by any legislation, as well as the companies that provide outsourced work. The study presents evidence which should be considered in determining whether any law may have an effect to reduce assignment outsourcing behaviours in higher education students.

Contract cheating is concerning educational institutions across the globe. Current knowledge of student perspectives on contract cheating is primarily informed by student surveys. Little is known about the student experience of being suspected of contract cheating and going through a formal university process. This study reports the findings of a qualitative study at an Australian university with student participants who had faced contract cheating allegations, using semi-structured, in-depth interviews. Five key themes emerged: 1) the most challenging experience of the student's life; 2) not telling their family about the allegation and managing any financial impact themselves; 3) stress and hypervigilance around future assignment submission; 4) rumours and reputational damage including changed relationships with academics and peers; and, 5) staying on track and guiding other students to practice academic integrity. Participants perceived the formal university process as a legal one, which contributed to it being a stressful and challenging experience. This was regardless of whether they had contract cheated or not. Recommendations for academic and support staff centre around ensuring formal university contract cheating processes are primarily a learning experience, from which students can emerge and progress to complete their studies.

Much of the burden of undergraduate teaching in Australian higher education institutions falls to sessional staff and postgraduate students. These members of staff assume high teaching loads and administrative management responsibilities. This paper explores the perspectives of two female academics in the unique position of being the subject co-ordinators for large first-year psychology units (around 1600 students) whilst still being doctoral (PhD) candidates. This situation raises interesting issues around the creation of academic identity. Using the metaphor of sinking or swimming in the deep end, we explore strategies to navigate the often turbulent waters of working in academia without drowning in teaching and administration, whilst attempting to stay afloat with doctoral research.

Contract cheating sites advertise that they provide high quality, undetectable, bespoke work delivered in a timely manner to students purchasing their assignments. This paper tests contract cheating sites' promises about the products they sell. We built on previous reported research examining contract cheating sites' persuasive features which were mapped into three major dimensions. In this study, we explore how those dimensions are realised in practice. By purchasing 54 assignments from 18 different contract cheating sites across a range of disciplines, we found contract cheating sites' promises flawed. Many sites do not deliver assignments on time, or at all; they provide variable quality assignments (including fail grade work), and do not necessarily respond rapidly to user queries. When markers graded work, 52% of cheated tasks failed to meet the university pass standard. Furthermore, many contract cheating sites retain the right to share personal details with third parties under their privacy clauses and require levels of personal identification that leave users vulnerable. Students need to be aware that contract cheating sites' slick advertising is not necessarily borne out in reality. Universities can draw on this study's findings for student awareness and deterrence campaigns pointing out the risks of using contract cheating sites.

"Almost everyone has difficulty identifying where collaboration stops and collusion begins." (Carroll & Appleton, 2001, p.15) In both policy and practice, collusion is a perplexing area of academic integrity. Students are expected to learn to work collaboratively in university courses, yet are often required to submit assessment tasks as individuals whilst in group-work situations. This paper discusses the tension between "collaboration" and "collusion" in group-work and the consequences for crossing the line. Adopting a theoretical framework from Bourdieu's work (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1971; Bourdieu, 1991) on symbolic power, the notion of legitimate voice and intertextuality, this paper outlines the effects on the academic identities of 17 students found "guilty" of collusion in one Australian university. In addition, 34 staff involved in formal disciplinary procedures were interviewed. The findings indicate that collusion is a fraught notion and not approached systematically across the university, nor with any degree of confidence by staff or students. The delineation between "acceptable collaboration" and "collusion" appears to be founded in shifting sands, with negative attitudes towards collaborative tasks being the main lesson learned by students.

Online education has a presence in most Australian universities, and its uptake has been broadly understood as being driven by external imperatives associated with intensive competition within the global knowledge economy. However, the implementation of online education does not take place uniformly, and tensions can arise as a consequence of the considerable variation in approaches taken by institutions, faculties, departments and individual educators. In this paper, we analyse interview data from five Australian universities to consider how senior administrators, teacher educators and educational designers interpret the drivers of and barriers to online education. Our findings indicate that there are considerable tensions between the economic considerations driving online delivery, the pedagogical approaches embraced by many teaching academics, and the practicalities associated with financial and human resource costs, technological supports and succession planning. We argue that minding the "P"s of purpose, pedagogy and practicalities can be a valuable and productive way forward for addressing ongoing issues of quality and sustainability in online education.

Contract cheating is the purchasing of custom-made university assignments with the intention of submitting them. Websites providing contract cheating services often claim this form of cheating is undetectable, and no published research has examined this claim. This paper documents a pilot study where markers were paid to mark a mixture of real student work and contract cheating assignments, to establish their accuracy at detecting contract cheating. Seven experienced markers individually blind marked the same bundle of 20 second-year psychology assignments, which included 6 that were purchased from contract cheating websites. Sensitivity analyses showed markers detected contract cheating 62% of the time. Specificity analyses showed markers correctly identified real student work 96% of the time. Our results contrast with contract cheating sites' claims that contract cheating is undetectable. However, they should be taken with caution as they are from one course unit in one discipline.

Issues of academic plagiarism in educational institutions are often played out in the public arena. Media reports that "scandals" occur in universities where plagiarism has gone undetected, or unpunished can undermine public faith in the academic integrity of higher education. Antiplagiarism software has been successfully marketed to universities as a means through which to detect and deter plagiarism. One commercially available product, Turnitin, has been embraced and implemented in many educational settings around the globe. Although Turnitin has been heralded as an effective measure to combat plagiarism, little empirical research has been undertaken to examine user perceptions of its effectiveness. This paper details a site-specific case study which explores the perspectives of seven teachers across five faculties at South-Coast University about the effectiveness and usability of Turnitin. The findings indicate that Turnitin assists in detecting passages where text matches other sources. However, the software does not indicate whether plagiarism has occurred or not. That remains the decision of the teacher. Additionally, such software should not be considered a panacea for plagiarism. Students still require explicit teaching of the concept of textual attribution, often with subject-specific examples to understand acknowledgement conventions within academia.

In universities around the world, plagiarism management is an ongoing issue of quality assurance and risk management. Plagiarism management discourses are often framed by legal concepts of authorial rights, and plagiarism policies outline penalties for infringement. Learning and teaching discourses argue that plagiarism management is, and should remain, a learning and teaching issue and press for more student-centred approaches to plagiarism management. Institutions must navigate these competing discourses in their attempts to design workable plagiarism management policies. After outlining plagiarism management contexts from the United Kingdom, Australia and Sweden to provide a sense of international work in the area, this article proposes a learner-centred quality assurance model (adapted from the work of Harvey and Newton (2004)) for plagiarism management. The proposed model refocuses on the learner and classroom practices in quality assurance processes. It offers a framework utilising learning, teaching and internal institutional research on plagiarism management to inform overall university policy.

Research leadership in Australian universities takes place against a backdrop of policy reforms concerned with measurement and comparison of institutional research performance. In particular, the Excellence in Research in Australian initiative undertaken by the Australian Research Council sets out to evaluate research quality in Australian universities, using a combination of expert review process, and assessment of performance against "quality indicators". Benchmarking exercises of this sort continue to shape institutional policy and practice, with inevitable effects on the ways in which research leadership, mentoring and practice are played out within university faculties and departments. In an exploratory study that interviewed 32 Australian academics in universities in four Australian states, we asked participants, occupying formal or informal research leadership roles, to comment on their perceptions of research leadership as envisioned and enacted in their particular workplaces. We found a pervasive concern amongst participants that coalesced around binaries characterized in metaphoric terms of "carrots and whips". Research leadership was seen by many as managerial in nature, and as such, largely tethered to instrumentalist notions of productivity and performativity, while research cultures were seen as languishing under the demoralizing weight of reward and punishment systems. Here, we consider what is at stake for the future of the academic workforce under such conditions, arguing that new models of visionary research leadership are urgently needed in the "troubled times" of techno-bureaucratic university reforms. (Contains 2 notes.)

Australian higher education increasingly relies on flexible modes of delivery as a means of attracting and retaining students in a highly competitive global education market. While education is among those disciplines that have been most actively involved in the shift from face-to-face to online learning and teaching, the transition for many teacher educators is fraught with tensions and contradictions. For some, teaching online is seen as primarily a cost-cutting exercise on the part of universities, and has little to do with improving the quality of student learning. For others, the online environment offers multiple pedagogic possibilities that have yet to be fully explored. Yet others consider online environments as problematic, posing challenges to pedagogic and peer relationships that are generally seen as integral to "good" teaching. This paper draws on an empirical study of teacher education faculties in five Australian universities, and analyses excerpts from interviews about learning and teaching with teacher educators, educational designers and faculty management. We argue that understanding how teacher educators constitute learner and teacher subjectivities through their beliefs about and approaches to pedagogy is crucial to the future of online tertiary education. In particular, we consider how teacher educators' attitudes toward and approaches to online learning and teaching are predicated on their perceived subject positions as either "stimulating" or "simulating" particular kinds of learning interactions.

Universities face constant scrutiny about their plagiarism management strategies, policies and procedures. A resounding theme, usually media inspired, is that plagiarism is rife, unstoppable and university processes are ineffectual in its wake. This has been referred to as a "moral panic" approach (Carroll & Sutherland-Smith, forthcoming; Clegg, 2007) and suggests plagiarism will thwart all efforts to reclaim academic integrity in higher education. However, revisiting the origins of plagiarism and exploring its legal evolution reveals that legal discourse is the foundation for many plagiarism management policies and processes around the world. Interestingly, criminal justice aims are also reflected in university plagiarism management strategies. Although universities strive for deterrence of plagiarism in a variety of ways, the media most often calls for retribution through increasingly tougher penalties. However, a primary aim of the justice system, sustainable reform, is not often reported in the media or visible in university policies or processes. Using critical discourse analysis, this paper examines the disjunction between media calls for increased retribution in the wake of moral panic and institutional responses to plagiarism. I argue that many universities have not yet moved to sustainable reform in plagiarism management. (Contains 2 tables and 1 note.)

Technologically-mediated learning environments are an increasingly common component of university experience. In this paper, the authors consider how the interrelated domains of policy contexts, new learning cultures and the consumption of information and communication technologies might be explored using the concept of technography. Understood here as a term referring to "the apprehension, reception, use, deployment, depiction and representation of technologies" (Woolgar, 2005, pp. 27-28), we consider how technographic studies in education might engage in productive dialogues with interdisciplinary research from the fields of cultural and cyber studies. We argue that what takes place in online learning and teaching environments is shaped by the logics and practices of technologies and their role in the production of new consumer cultures. (Contains 2 figures.)

Plagiarism is viewed by many academics as a kind of Pandora's box--the elements contained inside are too frightening to allow escape for fear of the havoc that may result. Reluctance by academic members of staff to discuss student plagiarism openly may contribute to the often untenable situations we, as teachers, face when dealing with student plagiarism issues. In this article, I examine the dilemmas English for Academic Purposes (EAP) staff face when dealing with student plagiarism in the tertiary classroom. The perceptions of all 11 teachers involved in teaching a first year EAP writing subject at South-Coast University are detailed in light of the university's policy on plagiarism. My research indicates that not only is an agreed definition of plagiarism difficult to reach by members of staff teaching the same subject, but plagiarism is a multi-layered phenomenon encompassing a spectrum of human intention. Evaluating the spectrum can lead to differences in the implementation of university plagiarism policy, the result of which embodies issues of equity. The aim of the article is to encourage policy-makers and academic staff to acknowledge the concerns about implementation of plagiarism policy. Collaborative, cross-disciplinary re-thinking of plagiarism is needed to reach workable solutions.

Because access to new technologies is unequally distributed, there has been considerable debate about the growing gap between the so-called information-rich and information-poor. Such concerns have led to high-profile information technology policy initiatives in many countries. In Australia, in an attempt to 'redress the balance between the information rich and poor' by providing 'equal access to the World Wide Web' ( Virtual Communities, 2002 ), the Australian Council of Trade Unions, Virtual Communities (a computer/software distributor) and Primus (an Internet provider) in late 1999 formed an alliance to offer relatively inexpensive computer and Internet access to union members in order to make 'technology affordable for all Australians' ( Virtual Communities, 2002 ). In this paper, we examine four families, one of which had long-term Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) access, and three of which took advantage of the Virtual Communities offer to get home computer and Internet access for the first time. We examine their engagement with ICT and suggest that previously disadvantaged family members are not particularly advantaged by their access to ICT.

Describes how the Internet was used for online interaction in a 10-week English-as-a-Second-Language course. Students were highly motivated and seeking eventual admittance to undergraduate programs through successful completion of International English language Testing System (IELTS) examinations. (Author/VWL)

Examines the complex connections among literacy practices, the use of information, and communication technologies (ICTs) and disadvantage. Reports findings of a year-long Australian study, which investigated ways that four families use ICTs to engage in formal and informal literacy learning in home and school settings. (BT)