Rethinking academic tasks as a way to fight against cyber-plagiarism in higher edcuaction

Abstract

The phenomenon of cyber-plagiarism has already been described by many authors (Cavanillas, 2008; Comas et al., 2011; Jones, 2009; Rowe, 2004; Underwood and Szabo, 2003), who have pointed out both the reasons that cause it and the measures to reduce this practice taking into account different points of view -institutional, academic and ethical measures, among others. This work aims to draw attention to the responsibility that could be ascribed to faculty when talking about cyber-plagiarism at online university studies. Instructors have in their hands the possibility of counteracting academic dishonesty by improving the tasks they give to students as deterrence to fraud and malpractice. To this end, we suggest some ideas to rethink tasks and assignments to make them more motivating and engaging to students. These recommendations stress creativity, personal reflection, and the use of any kind of (educational) technologies as measures to fight cyber-plagiarism at online university studies.