19th March 2024
Tech

Plagiarism in the world of online education

If not the world to lockdown, bringing the whole country has forced people to stay indoors. With schools, colleges, and universities being shut down to prevent the spread of the deadly disease, institutions had to find a suitable alternative. In such a disturbing situation, it is essential to ensure that education never takes a back seat. Hence, educators came forward with a solution—online schooling. 

With the whole system of teaching-learning being transferred, online teachers played the role of facilitators bringing new and innovative changes in their teaching methodology. The entire online concept is very new to teachers, students, and parents alike; thus, it was a challenge never faced before by anyone.

In this online education system, along with many other tools, one should also have a good grasp of the plagiarism checkers for education as they are indeed essential.

The first milestone crossed: online assessment.

The first step towards beginning the whole set up was choosing an ideal platform to start classes, a safe and handy platform at the same time. The next step that followed was a series of training for both the parties for smooth running academics. What stunned everyone was the introduction of online assignments!

The prolonged lockdown broke down the traditional system of parting education. To cope with the changing pace of time, educational institutes had to brainstorm to evaluate their learning. Without proper evaluation, one cannot judge the teaching method’s effectiveness and the students’ ability to grasp. 

Schools, colleges, and universities sought various ingenious modes for conducting examinations through the process and trial and error. While some appreciate this step as a sign of significant advancement, others are quite skeptical about the real purpose online assignments serve.

The latter group’s views are based on the growing examples of plagiarism, especially in education, which is being detected with plagiarism checker for education. There is no doubt that even experts have expressed concern over students of all age groups in the digital platform and its possible effect. 

Plagiarism in online set up:

Apart from other issues like addiction to social media, increased screen time, misusing the internet, cyber safety, cyberbullying, and more. Another looming threat to online schooling and taking advantage of it is to indulge in plagiarism. 

  • Students, especially in colleges and universities, often use unfair means to complete their papers assigned by their facilitators. Plagiarism checker for education capably identifies these. 
  • Maintaining the standard of education has become a challenge since students take online classes and turn assignments into an open-book exam. 
  • Often parents accompany their ward while sitting for tests. Again, this is nothing better than an act of plagiarism. 
  • The availability of multiple devices to the students has made it easier for them to look for solutions to the assignments’ questions. 

How to avoid plagiarism in online assignments?

  • In case students chose to copy and paste information available on a different website, it is the easiest way to identify plagiarism. Facilitators must use the plagiarism checker tools available online to generate a similarity report to pinpoint the copied words and sentences. 
  • Tools that enable teachers to compare two documents or files are also beneficial for plagiarism detection. The checker comparing two documents side by side allows the teachers to view similarities, grammar and spelling errors, and more.
  • At times the plagiarism detectors come with the API integration system that allows the academic institution to have plagiarism detection done within their LMS only, which smoothens the whole plagiarism checking process.
  • Some institutions have their specialized and dedicated application to conduct classes. However, mostly all other educational institutions make use of a third party domain. In the latter case, teachers need to be up-to-date with the latest features included. New features are added to give more control to the institutions. For example, leaving the turned video on for the entire test time reduces the chances of plagiarism effectively. 
  • It cannot be denied that there has been a paradigm shift in teaching-learning. One faces challenges dealing with it. However, the tools’ availability has made life easier: plagiarism, including summarizing and paraphrasing, and text missing citation can be tracked down with various new-age software. 

Conclusion

However, the educators’ determination and the noble idea of serving students the very best made institutions overcome all adversities. From textbooks to e-books, classroom to home, blackboard to screen share, face to face interaction to peeping through a smaller screen, the journey was not always smooth. There have been prominent drawbacks, but teachers, students, and parents’ collaboration has made this journey enjoyable and effective.