There is software that enables students to use computers without accessing the internet but we don’t have it at the institution where I teach. I’m curious what students can produce the “old-fashioned” way, writing with pen on paper. Doing so means their essays are not as long as they might be and some students simply have a hard time writing by hand, but I know that the pages they submit are their own.
Recent High-Profile Cases of Plagiarism
Plagiarism has recently made headlines. Writer Fareed Zakaria was suspended from Time magazine and CNN after he was found to have plagiarized a New Yorker article on gun control by historian Jill Lepore. Science writer Jonah Lehrer was forced to resign as a staff writer for The New Yorker, after he was found to have made up quotes by Bob Dylan in his best-selling book Imagine: How Creativity Works; the publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, has said that it will recall print copies of the book.
Certainly teachers go to great lengths to enjoin students to submit original work. I’m usually able to detect plagiarism in a student paper as a passage simply does not sound similar to students’ written-by-hand work students. But no human being could read all the writing assignments of the 39,000 students enrolled in Coursera’s “Fantasy and Science Fiction” course; hence the use of peer grading. Since students are not receiving college credits for the course, you could argue that there is not enough motivation for some (for many) to make the effort to produce original work.
Perhaps the plagiarism in Coursera courses points to a larger, yet to be addressed, issue with such Massive Open Online Courses. Is it not possible that some percentage of participants really just want to be able to gain the information from the course, and writing papers is an extra effort that seems too much to do for an uncredited, free course? Many “bricks and mortar” universities have honor codes that students are supposed to agree to, but (let’s be realistic) that does not mean that everyone follows them.
We can bring online education to the masses but still need to figure out how to evaluate the real vs. the fake work produced by students in the virtual classroom.
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