E-Learning and Online Teaching

Laura Gibbs: Plagiarism means that students are not learning. If Coursera is committed to providing a good learning experience for students in the course, then it needs to intervene with a student who is plagiarizing, making sure the student understands what it means to do original work and why that is crucial to the learning experience. This, for me, is actually the most important reason that something has to be done about this - and far better, of course, if something is done proactively, rather than after a student has plagiarized. Now that Coursera knows plagiarism is a potential problem in a course with these types of writing assignments, some kind of plagiarism education needs to take place before the writing assignments begin. In our class, that plagiarism education needs to happen ASAP.

Dennis O'Connor:  For anyone interested in teaching students how to recognize plagiarism, and create proper citations consider the 21cif Plagiarism Detection Kits: http://www.diigo.com/list/wiredinstructor/plagiarism_games

I learned about MentorMob when I spoke with Joyce Valenza at ISTE 2012. When Joyce speaks, I listen. This experimental lesson is my first use of MentorMob. Give it a try!

~ Dennis

Wiki edited by Laura Gibbs.

In my experience, people usually don't consciously decide to plagiarize, but they may end up plagiarizing "by accident" because they run out of time, or they get confused about the assignment, or maybe they copy-and-paste, intending to go back and edit later but forgetting to do so. Every time that I have seen plagiarism in an assignment, the person swore that the plagiarism happened "by accident." That does not change the fact of the matter: plagiarism, even when it happens by accident, is still plagiarism, and the consequences are serious. It's like when you are caught speeding or running a red light: it doesn't matter if you did not know you were speeding or if you did not notice the red light - you are still going to get a ticket.