Many online ‘learning’ platforms advertise themselves as “course-specific study material” resources, but in common practice they represent crowd-sourced platforms for the sharing of course materials with the specific intent of plagiarism. This presentation describes the development and implications of an anti-plagiarism application designed combat the illicit sharing of course material.
While there are an increasing number of online ‘learning’ platforms that offer students to access study resources like course materials, flashcards, educational videos and tutors, many of these platforms are simply thinly veiled plagiarism resources. Websites like Coursehero.com advertise themselves as providers of “course-specific study materials,” but in common practice they represent crowd-sourced platforms for the sharing of course materials with the specific intent of plagiarism. Students know that these platforms offer the space to trade coursework with the intention of submitting the work of others as their own.
Moreover, this business of crowd-sourced online plagiarism these platforms is thriving. CourseHero.com alone openly advertises its collection of “over 20 million course-specific study materials.” While academic institutions are increasingly making use of technologies such as biometrics, audio/video event monitoring, locked down browsers, and the likes to prevent student cheating, these systems only serve to manage intra-institutional student activity. Plagiarism rooted in online crowd-sourcing is beyond the reach of such technologies. Even wider digital similarity detection technology like those offered by Turnitin.com ultimately fail to address the scope of the rise of crowd-sourced plagiarism. Similarity detection technologies only serve as a passive measure, focused on addressing plagiarism after it occurs. Crowd-sourced plagiarism subverts this passive approach by offering students a potentially endless source of materials from which to plagiarize, creating to opportunity to utilize materials unregistered by similarity detection systems. Current intra-institutional and passive plagiarism control measures are simply a finger in a leaky dam trying to stem the flood of online plagiarism.
This presentation details the results of a project designed as an active online plagiarism control measure that works to address the distribution of course materials before they enter the online plagiarism flow. The “Course Villain” program is designed to actively monitor the distribution of course-materials from our university on an online crowd-sourced plagiarism platform, and to flag and aggregate results. Developed with internal university grant funding, as of 9/10/18 “Course Villain” has already generated 71 reports aggregated 1,420 unique results representing course materials from three courses since 6/7/18. These reports serve as the bedrock for both understanding breadth and depth of the illicit distribution of course materials, and a springboard for addressing that distribution. In this presentation, Speakers One and Two describe the scope and scale of the issue of crowd-sourced plagiarism with specific respect to their home university, detail the development of “Course Villain,” present a demonstration of “Course Villain’s” capabilities, and discuss the implications of and application “Course Villain” for online education as a whole.