CCFIT > Calendar & Minutes > May 09, 2006 Minutes

AGENDA
Don Dudley – SJA – plagiarism
Audience Response System
SAKAI - updated timeline. Availability for next year.
ETRA - any interesting proposals on the horizon? Proposals with
campus-wide implications?

Technical Support for Plagiarism Prevention and Detection
Don Dudley – SJA
History:
- Detection software. 5-6 years ago turn-it-in.org. Schools subscription (institution or per student). Check each paper against all others turned in and against the web. Used on campus for about 18 months. Concerns about intellectual property – requiring students to submit their intellectual property to a .com or .org.
- Ended agreement – rates “too high”

Current Campus situation:
- Recommend to faculty to use Google to check suspicious papers.
- Not checking against past assignments.
- No ongoing repository of papers.
- Some faculty are contracting to use turn-it-in.com on a subscription basis – passing the cost onto the students. ~$12/student/class

Considerations
- Faculty and TAs can’t catch all the local paper-sharing (different sections, different graders). Need technical support for this
- Sheer volume of student work being produced is huge. Concerns about the cost of storage and database space.
- Ease of use is an important consideration.
- Do the materials need to be ‘prepped’ before being uploaded? No – can submit .doc, .rtf, .txt a wide variety of formats are accepted.
- Jon Wagner – can we require campus-wide that all written work being loaded into a database? Automatically put into a central drop-box. Reported to instructor which papers were ‘red’. Report to students. No apparent reason why we can’t.

Possible solution
- PAIRwise is interesting software on the horizon. From UCSB.
- SAKAI – OSP2 (student portfolio system) might have overlapping data. Will be implemented in about 2 years.
- Turn-it-in.org takes care of storage, etc. Could be cost effective. And is a “well thought out and effective tool” (Osleger, D. 2006.) Students could get feedback on what should have been cited. Given a grace period to ‘fix’ any issues. Used as a teaching tool / teaching resource rather than just as a deterrent / way to punish offenders.
- Turn-it-in.org can be integrated with Sakai.

CONCLUSIONS:
It’s big. It’s out there. It’s important. We don’t have a solution. It is worth our time to discuss it and to pursue available solutions.

TRC will consider creating a working group to compare what is out there on this campus (technical strategies to addressing plagiarism). Contact Chairs, TSCs, TA Coordinators to identify what’s currently being used.
What are other prominent universities doing to address this issue?
Potential to have a pilot of PAIRwise.
Stakeholders – TRC, SJA, University Writing Program, Academic Senate, CC-FIT, IET.
To report back to CCFIT and IET.

Audience Response System
It was reiterated that we want to be in control of the student registration of clickers. We would prefer a single up-front cost for the clicker over a system where each student enrolls in each class through the manufacturer. Liz educated us that there is an ‘external database’ that would be the natural home for each students’ clicker number. As students register in each class, the faculty member will be able to identify which clicker belongs to which student.