Dear Readers,

Welcome to the April ENAI newsletter of 2021.
The main topic of the newsletter is the European Conference on Academic Integrity and Plagiarism 2021 which starts already in two months: from 9th to 11th June and it will be online.
 

This very up-to-date question was answered by Dr. Fiona O’Riordan.
Fiona is an Academic Developer in the Teaching Enhancement Unit in Dublin City University (DCU). She is one of the founding members, and active member of the steering committee for the Irish Conference on Engaging Pedagogy. She was recently seconded to the National Forum Professional Development Expert Group where she worked with this group piloting the implementation of the national Professional Development Framework, and is one of two DCU representatives on the National Academic Integrity Network. Her research areas include assessment; academic integrity; the voice of educators; and curriculum development. (Full profile here).

For many of us, our first instinct when we realized we needed to move to online assessment was Oh No! Primarily because of the abruptness of this massive shift.  We were entertaining the notion of moving towards blended for a long time, looking for the evidence, the reassurance, the guarantee that online assessment could be a good thing. We were nervously discussing it with our colleagues, our students, our technologists. We all agreed it was important to move towards a blended or hybrid assessment approach. But the online assessment environment with such a high-risk task, surely the answer would always be no.
 
That was BC (Before-Covid19). The lock-down gave us a firm nudge into considering alternative assessment approaches; to deeply engage in assessment dialogue in a critical way. Once we accepted we had to change our approach, we put our minds to the best way to design assessments to promote academic integrity. We began to see this new assessment environment as an opportunity to engage in different ways of assessing, for example take home or oral exams. It was as if we now had the permission to take the risks we wondered about ‘BC’. We had support and research to help us make informed decisions about how best to assess our students in an online environment, how to ensure our approach promoted academic integrity. Not only were we being applauded for considering alternative assessments, but processes were adjusted to help swiftly assure and approve the changes. Good for us. But does attention to re-designing assessment promote academic integrity with students?
 
Students want to behave with integrity.  They want to produce work they are proud of, that contributes to their development. Perhaps we are too quick to make assumptions about student propensity to engage in poor academic behaviour i.e. they want the easy option, they are not interested in learning, etc. What if we turned those types of assumptions on their head and viewed students as committed, engaged, and enthusiastic learners. Those types of expectations influence assessment design. We could then begin to think of value added assessment approaches, that offer students an opportunity to showcase learning to potential employers, researchers or for further studies. Students could use assessment opportunities to build a portfolio of their expertise and competencies. This requires assessment design that is authentic, scaffolded and partners the students.
 
Promoting academic integrity is not a one solution fits all.  It is a multi-pronged holistic and integrated approach to assessment design. The pivot into online or blended assessment offered us the opportunity to re-think traditional assessment. However we do have to recognise that we did not have the luxury of the time required to engage in a deep, reflective, and considered re-design. We had to move swiftly. But now we have a firm basis, and evidence-based practice across the sector, to further modify and redesign assessment for the new world, assessment that promotes academic integrity no matter what the mode is.
 
So in my opinion, the move to online assessment was, and is, good for academic integrity. I am not for a moment suggesting the swift pivot made things easy, it just provided the opportunity to shake things up. It may have been a blunt instrument, but most transformative disruptions are severe. I don’t think we will ever take assessment for granted again. The days of having the question ‘why do you assess like that’ answered with ‘because that is the way we have always done it’ are behind us.

We are waiting for the authors of these 82 contributions to submit any corrections to their abstracts as soon as possible. We need to have all of them reviewed and approved, then the un-anonymised copies of abstracts submitted by 1st May, together with authors‘ options on what length of presentation is preferred – we will try to match authors‘ preferences when we schedule the conference programme.

The submission of presentations and workshops is already closed. If you have not yet submitted a contribution to the conference, then please note that we are still accepting submissions of abstracts for PechaKucha inspired contributions – the ideal format when you want to share mainly visual information. The extended deadline for the PechaKucha abstracts is 1st May.

Nominations for awards may be submitted by any member of ENAI or ENAI supporters via the ENAI awards submission portal. The normal process will be for nominees to be submitted by a third party. Self-nomination is not encouraged. 
Formal recognition will take place at the upcoming annual conference at which the recipient will receive a plaque.
Find more details about the categories, criteria and the process here.

Submission: Nominations may be submitted until 17^th May 2021.

Entry is restricted to students (they are students in the moment of the submission of the photo to the contest) enrolled at schools, colleges and higher education institutions. There are no technical restrictions on the photographs. The contest participant submitting the photo must be the creator of the photo (he/she took the photo by himself/herself).
When the photos are submitted, the student will be required to agree that their photo may be used by ENAI for promotional activities (share the photo under a public licence, namely Creative Commons 0).

We are thrilled to announce the launch of ENAI Summer School 2021 on Academic Integrity, which has been designed for PhD students who are interested in academic integrity. Other people interested in participating who are not PhD students will also be welcome should there be any spaces.
The summer school will be organized collaboratively by Canakkale Onsekiz Mart University, Turkey; University of Wollongong in Dubai, UAE; and Lithuanian Centre for Social Sciences, Lithuania on behalf of ENAI.
The five-day summer school will run between June 14-18, 2021, the week after the European Conference on Academic Integrity and Plagiarism.
There will be two sessions each day at the summer school. Session 1 will be from 9:00 am to 12:00 pm CEST and Session 2 will be from 1:00 pm to 4:00 pm CEST. In total there will be 10 sessions addressing 10 topics related to academic integrity.
Sessions cover both theory and hands on practice in addition to discussions, working both individually and in groups. Each session will be delivered by experts with specific experience of dealing with the topic. In addition to running the workshops, the experts will provide feedback to students about their research projects.
Due to COVID-19, the summer school will be available online only. Registration is free and anyone either from an ENAI member or non-member institution is eligible to apply for the summer school. ENAI will issue a "Certificate of Attendance" to all participants. As there are no parallel sessions, participants are expected to attend all 10 sessions during the week. Applications can be made through ENAI webpage.
 
We are very much looking forward to welcoming you and/or your students to our summer school.

Find all details on the Summer School including preliminary schedule here.
 

Following the last year's successful events, ENAI is in collaboration with the Centre for Research Ethics & Bioethics at Uppsala University, Sweden organizing four lunch webinars during the European Academic Integrity Week (EAIW, 18th-22nd October), one for each day of the week except for Wednesday when we would like to encourage academics to organize academic integrity events at their home institutions.

We invite the academic integrity community to propose a webinar session of 90 minutes to be offered within the EAIW. The call for proposals for the webinars will be open until May 1st. Those who are interested are invited to send an e-mail with the proposed topic and a short description (300 words) to sonja.bjelobaba@academicintegrity.eu.

The decision on which proposals to be include in the EAIW will be decided by the ENAI Board. The webinar proposals that are selected will be announced at the ECAIP2021 conference in June and on the ENAI website.

In order to promote academic integrity in an international context from students' perspective ENAI has set up a forum for students to communicate with each other and with the greater ENAI membership. Working group for students is coordinated by the European Students' Union, to highlight the central role of students in promoting academic integrity within the academic community. We invite all the students to apply to become members of the working group for students. By being a member, you will learn to  understand the values of academic integrity and writing skills, contribute to national and international policy making/review activities, engage in capacity-building activities, meet like-minded students and experts in academic integrity from Europe and beyond. More information about the call for membership can be found here.

In March 2021, Sarah Elaine Eaton from University of Calgary published her book Plagiarism in higher education: Tackling tough topics in academic integrity (230 pages, 13 hours of reading). We share this news not only because Sarah is a keynote speaker at the ENAI’s conference this year, but mostly because it is a great book.
What may be surprising for readers having their background in exact sciences like math or informatics, the book does not contain neither a definition of plagiarism, nor any classification or categorization. It rather describes the issue from various points of view and make the reader think. Sarah convincingly explains that we should avoid moral binaries – instead of trying to distinguish between good and bad the book captures plagiarism and related issues in its entirety. Together with author’s own experience it makes in invaluable source for any academic interested in the topic.

After the ICAI conference there was another interesting on-line event that took place in March 2021, particularly interesting for folks with a computer science background: the Computational Research Integrity Conference organized by Syracuse University. Not only did Debora Weber-Wulff provide presentations about responsible use of text-matching systems and the ENAI TeSToP project, the conference was full of really interesting talks. To find out more, read Debbie’s blog post series. It is very condensed but well worth reading by following the links.

Thanks to colleagues from the University of Monterrey (Mexico), ENAI's Glossary for Academic Integrity has now been translated into Spanish. The Spanish version is available for download as a PDF at ENAI's website.
Spanish is already the 11th language of the Glossary and ENAI is happy to welcome more translations. If you would like to have the glossary available in your language as well and you can arrange for the translation, then please contact us!

Recent study by the University of Balearic Islands shows an alarming trend in students propensity to cheat during the pandemic. The study did not rely on self-reported data, but analyzed the trends in Google search terms:

The result obtained shows that the search trends for concepts related to copying in online exams increased significantly during 2020, doubling and tripling in some cases the interest in these topics when compared to the searches carried out in the previous 4 years.

Read the whole article by Rubén Comas Forgas and Jaume Sureda Negre in The conversation (in Spanish).

We will approach you with the regular newsletter in June 2021. If you want to share with us, and with other recipients, any interesting news from your country or some curiosities from the area of academic integrity, we will welcome your contributions. Please send them to info@academicintegrity.eu before the 15th June.
Feel free to share the newsletter with your friends and colleagues, or send them this subscription link, the newsletter is open to everyone!