Carlow IT Department: Bits-N-Bytes Newsletter Winter 2006

Plagiarism
Software

Does Carlow have a problem with plagiarism? Is plagiarism a problem on college campuses across the United States? Many feel that the internet makes it easy to share papers and to copy articles, but Carlow’s use of the MyDropBox anti-plagiarism software throughout the fall semester indicates that Carlow is about on par with other institutions of higher learning across the country.

During the summer, Carlow received a one-year free trial of the MyDropBox

plagiarism checks, it generates easy-to-read reports for the faculty member or the
student, where all unoriginal material is highlighted and linked to its online or database sources. There are two ways to use this software. A faculty member can use the software by having thestudent submit the papers themselves to the site and then the faculty member can review the reports to ensure there was no plagiarism OR a faculty member can use it as a teaching tool and have the students submit the papers and review the reports

43 Carlow faculty registered 52 classes with the software and 227 documents were uploaded to the MyDropBox site throughout the semester. Carlow ended the semester with a 17.62% plagiarism rate, which can be compared to 17.79% over all the institutions using this software. This does not mean that 17.62% of all papers were plagiarized, but rather it means that of the total content of the 227 documents submitted, approximately 17.6% of the content was identifiable as coming from another source. In some cases, this could mean that a student did not properly cite quoted material.

anti-plagiarism software and implemented it starting in the fall semester. This software checks papers that students turn in electronically to identify unoriginal content, including paraphrased or otherwise altered text. After a series of comprehensive

themselves to see how their paper might be interpreted by this checking software.

To implement this software, Carlow held 5 Computer Café sessions for faculty who wanted to implement the software for their classes.

If you are a faculty member and would like to use the MyDropBox software, please let us know and we will work with you on training and set-up.

This winter, a group of very excited faculty is participating in the Winter Institute on Teaching with Technology. During this institute, the faculty will learn how to use Blackboard to supplement their classes. This series focuses not only on how to technically implement Blackboard, but also on the teaching methods that can be employed to supplement a class with Blackboard.

For the Winter Institute, there are a series of 5 classes over a 4 month period each lasting about 3 hours. The Winter Institute is taught by Denise King and is supplemented by Nola Coulson and Karen Sturgeon. The participants include: Carol Caliendo (Dean),Chrys Gabrich (Dean), Diane Matthews (Management), Sr. Roberta Campbell (Education), Carol Johnson (Education), Ann Herbruck (Education), Monique Shumaker (Sciences), Michael Balmert (Social Change), and Joel Woller (Humanities).

On the last day of the session, the members of the class will discuss their accomplishments and show the other members of the class their courses. We are in the planning stages for this summer’s institutes. We are considering teaching two institutes; one on Blackboard, and one on other uses of technology in the classroom.

We already have some requests to participate in the summer institutes. If you are interested, please contact Karen Sturgeon in I.T. Each of the summer sessions will be one week long. Both of these sessions welcome full-time faculty and adjuncts.

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