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This paper presents a case study carried out at Sofia University in Bulgaria, describing the relationship between two developments, firstly an expanding involvement with online learning and e-assessment, and secondly the development of institutional approaches to academic integrity. The two developments interact, the widening use of e-learning and e-assessment raising new issues for academic integrity, and the technology providing new tools to support academic integrity, with the involvement in technological developments acting as a catalyst for changes in approaches to academic integrity. The aim of this study is to describe in what ways the integration of technologies for student authentication and authorship checking in this university has begun to influence teachers' approach to academic integrity, and has also helped to identify specific issues that need to be resolved for the future of academic integrity in the university. Data collected during the implementation of pilots for the project TeSLA--An adaptive trust-based e-assessment system - enabled an examination of the perspectives of administrators, teachers and students on approaches to cheating and plagiarism, and on possible future directions. The data suggests that the piloting of the TeSLA system has triggered a deepening consideration of approaches to academic integrity, and has also helped to identify important issues for future developments.

Student authentication and authorship checking systems are intended to help teachers address cheating and plagiarism. This study set out to investigate higher education teachers' perceptions of the prevalence and types of cheating in their courses with a focus on the possible changes that might come about as a result of an increased use of e-assessment, ways of addressing cheating, and how the use of student authentication and authorship checking systems might impact on assessment practice. This study was carried out within the context of the project TeSLA (an Adaptive Trust-based e-assessment System for Learning) which is developing a system intended for integration within an institution's Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) offering a variety of instruments to assure student authentication and authorship checking. Data was collected at two universities that were trialling the TeSLA system, one in Turkey, where the main modes of teaching are face-to-face teaching and distance education, and one in Bulgaria, where the main modes of teaching are face-to-face teaching and blended learning. The study used questionnaires and interviews, building on existing TeSLA project evaluation activities and extending these to explore the specific areas we wished to examine in more depth. In three of the four contexts cheating was seen by teachers as a serious and growing problem, the exception was the distance education context where the teachers believed that the existing procedures were effective in controlling cheating. Most teachers in all four contexts expected cheating to become a greater problem with increased use of e-assessment. Student authentication was not seen as a major problem in any of the contexts, as this was felt to be well controlled through face-to-face proctored assessments, though the problem of assuring effective authentication was seen by many teachers as a barrier to increased use of e-assessment. Authorship checking was seen as a major issue in all contexts, as copying and pasting from the web, ghost writing and plagiarism were all reported as widely prevalent, and authorship checking was seen as becoming even more important with increased use of e-assessment. Teachers identified a third category of cheating behaviours, which was the accessing of information from other students, from written materials, and from the internet during assessments. Teachers identified a number of approaches to addressing the problem of cheating: education, technology, assessment design, sanctions, policy, and surveillance. Whilst technology was not seen as the most important approach to prevention, student authentication and authorship checking systems were seen as relevant in terms of reducing reliance on face-to-face proctored examinations, and in improving the quality of assessment through supporting the employment of a wider range of assessment methods. The development of authorship checking based on computational linguistic approaches was an area of particular interest. Student authentication and authorship checking systems were not seen as being able to address the third category of cheating behaviours that the study identified.

This paper explores the ways in which information about course pedagogy has been represented to potential students through national descriptors and specifications such as the United Kingdom's Key Information Set. It examines the extent to which such descriptors provide helpful information about pedagogy, for example innovative uses of technology. The paper starts by exploring the wider context within which these descriptors have been developed, including a comparison of similar descriptions internationally. This is followed by a comparative analysis, in which two courses (one single honours undergraduate degree, one Massive Open Online Course) are classified and compared. This serves to illustrate the blind spots in classifications such as the Key Information Set. The paper concludes by arguing that further work is needed to develop classification schemes that both address explicitly the interests of potential students and are able to represent the pedagogic decisions that differentiate teaching in contemporary higher education.

The collection of student feedback is seen as a central strategy to monitor the quality and standards of teaching and learning in higher education institutions. The increasing use of technology to support face-to-face, blended and distance courses has led managers as well as practitioners to become increasingly concerned to identify appropriate ways of assuring the quality of this e-learning provision. This paper presents a study of the collection of student feedback in higher education e-learning courses and the use of this feedback for quality assurance and enhancement. We carried out a series of case studies of the procedures in place in four e-learning courses, and in each case study we collected the quality assurance documentation and interviewed stakeholders (administrators, educational technologists, tutors and students). The comparative examination of these two sets of data showed that the main strategies for collecting student feedback--module evaluations and student representation--were both strongly affected by the distinctive features of the mode of delivery in e-learning courses, and as a consequence they were not able to adequately support quality enhancement. The remote location of the students impacted on both student representation and on the response rates for module evaluations. The enhancement function of the module evaluations were adversely affected by lack of appropriate course management arising from the disaggregation of course processes and the resulting ambiguity in the allocation of responsibilities.

Purpose: This paper reports on an empirical study exploring the way in which campus-based higher education institutions (HEIs) in the UK apply their internal quality assurance and enhancement (QA/QE) procedures to their e-learning courses. The purpose of this paper is to identify those characteristics of e-learning courses which affected the capacity of these procedures to assure and enhance the quality of courses. Design/methodology/approach: A case study approach is selected as most appropriate for an in-depth examination of the features of the courses as well as the way in which the procedures are applied. Two sets of data are collected and analysed from each of four e-learning courses: QA documentation and interviews with stakeholders. Findings: It is found that the main factors impacting on the effectiveness of the QA procedures are: the organisational position that these courses had within their institutions; the distributed configuration of course, teams; the disaggregated processes that characterise e-learning courses; and the distant location of students. These factors are found to be impacting on the potential of the QA/QE procedures to enhance the quality of the courses. Practical implications: These case studies highlight the need for campus-based universities to reassess their approach to the QA/QE of e-learning courses, and identify the challenges that course teams face in moving on from the application of QA procedures to addressing the issues of QE. Originality/value: The originality of this paper lies in its analysis of empirical data about the application of QA/QE procedures in e-learning courses in higher education. (Contains 1 figure and 1 table.)