Introduction and overview

Welcome to the course All my own work: exploring academic integrity. As you might anticipate from the title, the aim of this short course is to help you explore the issues around producing your own work for academic purposes.

This course goes beyond the ‘nuts and bolts’ of referencing styles to enable you to understand what is meant by ‘good academic conduct’ and to explore why it is so important. Along the way, you will consider how you can avoid common pitfalls and difficulties.

This free course will take you around 6 hours to complete; you are able to work through at your own pace, pausing and restarting to suit your own timetable. As you progress through the material, you’ll see that there are a number of straightforward activities to help you explore important ideas and concepts in more depth.

All my own work: exploring academic integrity is divided into three main sessions. In the list below, you’ll see the suggested amount of time needed for each.

• Session 1: Exploring the concepts of ethics, trust and academic community, i.e. the ‘why’ behind the importance of producing your own work.

  You will cover the following topics:

  • What is plagiarism?
  • Demonstrating your academic abilities
  • The consequences of plagiarism: detecting plagiarism
  • The consequences of plagiarism: what happens next
  • Myth-busting

  This first session will take around 90 minutes to complete.

• Session 2: Exploring the ‘when and when not’ aspects of referencing

  In this session you’ll cover the following topics:

  • Common knowledge
  • Quoting, citing and referencing
  • Challenges and temptations

  This middle session will take around 120 minutes to complete and will include working your way through an interactive.

• Session 3: Exploring the ‘how’ of producing your own work

  In this session you’ll cover:

  • Paraphrasing
  • Using direct quotes
  • Learning together
  • How to avoid collusion
  • Study skills and time management
  • Asking for help

  This final session will take around 120 minutes to complete.

At the end of the final session there will then be a quiz to check your understanding. By passing this quiz, which should take you around 30 minutes to complete, you will also have the opportunity to earn a digital badge as evidence of your learning. You can read more on how to study the course and about badges in the next sections.

After studying this course, you should be able to:

• understand what is meant by plagiarism
• understand why it is important to produce one’s own work
• recognise what is meant by ‘in-text citation’ and ‘full reference’
• understand the difference between ‘collaboration’ and ‘collusion’
• show knowledge of techniques to avoid plagiarism.