Academic Integrity - Online Tutorial

The online interactive tutorial, Academic Integrity: referencing and avoiding plagiarism, was developed to address the needs of first year students for effective academic writing which avoids accidental or intentional plagiarism. The positive notion of academic integrity was the focus, and the tutorial includes components which develop users' referencing skills within two referencing styles, clarify the meaning of inappropriate practices such as collusion or copying, and the consequences of inappropriate academic practices, and address academic practices that reduce the likelihood of plagiarism. This tutorial uniquely integrates instruction with real-life student cases, and users’ active, engaged participation with interactive exercises.

Learning is promoted by extensive feedback and multiple attempts and users’ progress and outcomes are recorded in a database. The tutorial has a refreshing, attractive design to appeal to early stage university students, but with a tone promoting the seriousness of the focus. This web-based tutorial was developed with aspx coding, and includes flash overlays to enhance learning through visual demonstration. The needs of diverse learners were considered, such as a range of cultural backgrounds in the cases, ensuring all visual information represented in text was suitable for visually impaired users, incorporating the use of screen readers, and designing the flash demonstrations to reduce cognitive overload.

The tutorial is an effective means to provide learners with knowledge and skills to complete their university studies with academic integrity, with the flexibility of individual user needs for repeated attention and flexibility of time and location, as well as an effective use of School funding and staffing.