The Lighthouse Diary Entry #27: Academic Integrity and Turnitin

I attended a webinar yesterday morning. Yes, another webinar. The local distributor of Turnitin, APAC Marketing organized a 2 hour webinar on Academic Integrity at the heart of teaching and learning processes. There is less talk of the Turnitin app and more of practices in teaching and learning. 

One takeaway I have from the webinar is the 70-30 approach in online distance learning. This means, 70% is allotted for asynchronous learning and 30% for synchronous learning. This may imply that the design of instruction for asynchronous learning will lean towards student agency, engagement and independent learning. Skills teaching is paramount. Synchronous learning would entail follow up, following through, tutorial type sessions, show and model strategies. Concepts and content, especially those that cover a prescribed curriculum may need to be revisited.

I appreciated the input session of Dr. Michael Dino on Academic Integrity. I was holistic, historical and culturally relevant to our teaching practices. The live online forum that followed right after the product demo of Gradescope was engaging. Gradescope helps teachers manage and administer grades and assessments. Pegged as easy to use, it generates data that may help inform teachers on skills and concepts that have been learned and would need improvement on.

During the open forum, there were many questions about plagiarism and citations. I had to involve myself on this topic. I just cannot. So, I gave some suggestions on citation processes and the necessity of following a citation format to guide students and researchers in the responsible use of information and varied media formats.

This led me to another insight on Academic Integrity. It is about relationships. Knowing the learner, first of all, and the teacher recognizing and seeing himself or herself as a learner too, are factors to building a caring and respectful relationship necessary for learning honestly and with integrity.

Turnitin is neat app to detect plagiarism, thereby upholding Academic Integrity. But at the end of the day, it is a tool. We need to make these tools work for our advantage and not the other way around.