APLA Conference 2022

Despite ubiquitous warnings and discussions around plagiarism, many students have a very superficial understanding of the concept. There are many reasons for this, ranging from diverse cultural attitudes and previous educational experiences to a lack of available, accessible, and timely information about the topic.
For many years, librarians at the Patrick Power Library have provided workshops about academic integrity, plagiarism, and citation styles as part of our instruction program. Although well received, the amount of content that can be covered in a 90 minute or one hour workshop is limited and does not allow for in-depth student engagement.

In 2019, the University Senate expressed a need for an educational offering to cultivate academic integrity. The information literacy librarians saw an opportunity to broaden our support for academic integrity and created what became a new non-credit course: Academic Integrity Foundations (AIF). The arrival of the pandemic in 2020, followed by campus shutdowns and a pivot to online learning, made clear the benefits of developing AIF so that students can proceed through the material at their own pace, testing their understanding as they go.
Piloted and launched in 2021, AIF is an asynchronous, module-based, interdisciplinary Brightspace course designed to educate students about academic integrity, and how to avoid mistakes like plagiarism. To date, more than 1500 students have completed AIF.

In this presentation, we will provide a brief background on the development and implementation of AIF, including a look at its content and assessments, how it is being used, reaction and feedback, and our plans for AIF going forward.