Information and digital literacy in education via the digital path

Plagiarism seems like a clear-cut crime: if the words of another author appear in one’s writing without appropriate attribution, that writer has “stolen” those words. U.S. higher education institutions take the offense seriously: minor cases often result in probation, suspension, or expulsion. This black-and-white perspective toward plagiarism, however, does not effectively identify, prevent, or resolve writing issues.

Plagiarism may flag instances of knowledge gaps or poor writing skills rather than malicious intent. In order to avoid academic conduct hearings involving your students, consider how the design of writing assignments can detect writing issues before they evolve into serious academic conduct issues. Consider these four strategies to help “plagiarize-proof” your course.

As another year draws to a close, the editorial team at Faculty Focus looks back on some of the most popular articles of the year. Throughout 2017, we published more than 200 articles, covering a wide range of teaching and learning topics, including assignment strategies, cell phone policies, course design, flipped classrooms, online discussions, study strategies, and grading policies.

As a teacher of a subject that I adore and cherish, I often find myself scrambling for enough time to cover everything that needs to be covered and still find a clever way to introduce yet another “cool story” that will further convince my students that my field (microbiology) is relevant to everyday life.

No doubt I am not alone in this challenge of finding ways to demonstrate relevancy of what we teach, but not at the complete expense of the time and effort we desperately need to guide our students through challenging, key concepts and ideas.

I wondered if creating relevancy for students would be better achieved if it didn’t start with me, but rather with them. Allowing our students to have more say about assignments is a learner-centered strategy that can be used to promote student ownership and investment in a course and it supports students’ efforts to develop responsibility for their own learning (Lang, 2016 and Weimer, 2014).

For students who are insecure about their writing abilities, audio reflection relieves the paralyzing fear of spelling errors and misplaced commas.

For my Introduction to Sociology course, I developed an intensive, hands-on assignment that gives students the opportunity to experience sociology at work.