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Back to the Classroom: Educating Sessional Teaching Staff about Academic Integrity

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A Publisher Correction to this article was published on 05 February 2021

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Abstract

The increased incidences of academic misconduct in universities are compromising the reputation of higher education in Australia and increasing the work of academics responsible for the delivery of quality learning outcomes to students. Confronted with increasing instances of academic dishonesty in university classrooms, universities play a pivotal role in ensuring their academic staff are well-equipped with academic integrity knowledge. It is therefore important to understand academic staff perspectives about the training their workplaces could provide them on academic integrity. Specifically, this qualitative case study explores the opinions and perceptions of sessional or casual university academic staff on what content they would like to know about academic integrity, and how this knowledge could best be delivered to them. The study found that participants (N = 18) were genuinely interested in furthering their understanding of academic integrity issues, particularly in the areas of contract cheating, effective use of plagiarism detection tools, and developing a toolkit of skills that they could use to detect and deter plagiarism. In terms of the delivery of academic integrity training programs, webinars and orientation sessions were suggested as effective delivery mechanisms. Imparting knowledge about the content areas through the identified delivery mechanisms could enhance teaching faculty’s understanding of student academic dishonesty and how to curb this behaviour proactively.

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Notes

  1. Zoom is an online video conferencing tool used to conduct meetings between participants via the internet (Cuaca Dharma et al. 2017).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Engineering and Technology, Central Queensland University, Melbourne, Australia

    Ritesh Chugh

  2. School of Engineering and Technology, Central Queensland University, Rockhampton, Australia

    Jo-Anne (Jo) Luck

  3. Ningbo City College of Vocational Education, Ningbo, China

    Darren Turnbull

  4. School of Access Education, Melbourne, Australia

    Edward Rytas Pember

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  1. Ritesh Chugh
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  2. Jo-Anne (Jo) Luck
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Correspondence to Ritesh Chugh.

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The original online version of this article was revised: On page 14 of the published PDF version of the article (the paragraph on top of “Redesigning Assessments to Mitigate Academic Dishonesty”), first word of the first line, should read “Plagiarism incident reporting” not “Plagiarism”.

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Chugh, R., Luck, JA.(., Turnbull, D. et al. Back to the Classroom: Educating Sessional Teaching Staff about Academic Integrity. J Acad Ethics 19, 115–134 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10805-021-09390-9

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