Monitoring Uncharted Communities of Crowdsourced Plagiarism
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Monitoring Uncharted Communities of Crowdsourced Plagiarism Zachary Dixon 1
& Kelly George
2
# Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract
This paper reports on a study of crowd-sourcing ‘study aid’ web platforms. Students are sharing completed academic coursework through a growing network of ‘study aid’ web platforms like CourseHero.com. These websites facilitate the crowd-sourced exchange of coursework, and effectively support plagiarism. However, virtually no data exists concerning the scope or extent of coursework being shared through these platforms. This paper reports on two experiments to monitor the frequency of coursework from a sample university uploaded onto CourseHero.com. Ultimately, both experiments failed to produce a clear or meaningful measurement of coursework upload frequency. The apparently widespread use of these crowd-sourcing ‘study aid’ websites and the failure of these experiments demonstrates the need for further investigation into how much coursework is being shared through such platforms, how frequently it is shared, and what kind of coursework is being shared. Addressing these issues is an important step into measuring the impact of these wellsprings of academically dishonest behavior. Keywords Plagiarism . Crowd-sourcing . Affinity spaces . Networked information economy
Introduction The higher education learning environment is rapidly changing, with the online environment hosting an increasingly diverse array of learning platforms for use within and beyond the classroom. As advancing digital information communication technologies enable greater * Zachary Dixon [email protected] Kelly George [email protected]
1
Department of English, Humanities & Communication, Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, FL 32114, USA
2
Department of Social Science and Economics, Embry Riddle Aeronautical University, Daytona Beach, FL 32114, USA
Z. Dixon, K. George
student access to higher education, as well as more diverse ways to produce and access academic content, administrators, instructors, and researchers are fighting an equally diverse new wave of plagiarism and other kinds of academic misconduct. One particularly shady and vexing corner of plagiarism’s new online frontier territories is the community of crowdsourced ‘study aid’ websites. Web platforms like CourseHero.com, Cheeg.com, Slader, Studyblue, and StudySoup represent themselves as ‘online learning platforms’ or ‘study aid platforms’ that offer students access to study resources like course materials, flashcards, educational videos, and tutors. However, many of these platforms are simply thinly veiled plagiarism resources. While websites like CourseHero.com advertise themselves as providers of “course-specific study materials” (2019a), in common practice they represent platforms for the crowd-sourced sharing of completed coursework. A simple browse through CourseHero.com’s content reveals syllabi, homework help, instructor notes, as well as homework solutions, complete essays, completed tests, and other course materials produc
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