I participated in a panel with Erin Alcock, Jane Costello, and Josh Seeland today. Over 2,000 people registered for the webinar, and over 500 actually attended.
My job was to set the stage. I began stating that we need to approach academic integrity with a level-head. Concerns about academic integrity are nothing new, and one of the chapters in the book details the steps taken to insure unfair collaboration did not take place during civil service exams in ancient China. In 2015, Winrow pulled together a list of all the quantitative studies on academic integrity completed around the world. These are mostly self-reported studies involving a very simple methodology: a researcher asks a group of students in a particular locale: did you or did you not commit an academic integrity violation while you were in school (Full disclosure: I did! I earned money by writing research papers for friends)? Protected by anonymity, students say yes or no. These various studies establish that academic integrity violations are global, widespread, and pre-date artificial intelligence.
But just because it’s commonplace, this is deadly serious business for colleges and universities. Academic integrity violations undermine the signal value of postsecondary credentials and may be a contributing factor to declining support for public education.
Since 2017 or so, my main focus has been on the assessment of student learning, and this is one of the connections with librarianship because academic librarians (based on the conversations I’ve had over the past decade), have seen a lot of bad research assignments. So, let’s make assessments better and proceed with that work with all haste through faculty collaborations.
That’s good as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far. Assessment, just like libraries, is connected to everything else. Tracey Bretag described postsecondary education as an ecosystem under extreme stress, and librarians cannot respond to assessment or academic integrity without being cognizant of these other factors.
As only one example: 50% of all faculty in the US and Canada are now part-time instructors, and part-time faculty are the least likely to know the hows and whys of assessment. This is an important consideration when libraries approach faculty collaboration on assessments because PT faculty are distant from the institution and may be hard to collaborate with. Another exmaple: Institutions may continue to spend more on academic integrity technology (such as ineffective detectors), or buying supplier-led chatbots and other AI solutions, further displacing their ability to spend on library resources, especially at a time of funding stagnation and increasing class sizes, knowing that academic integrity violations become more likely in depersonalized learning environments.
Generative AI complicates an environment already under extreme stress. Today’s webinar was not primarily about generative AI, but generativeAI will be a main topic or subtopic no matter where we go for some time. It will be like the Internet in 1995-1997, or the conversation around Google and the death of reference services between 1999-2011, when some said “farewell to the reference librarian.” Or what the Kindle did to library collections since it was introduced in 2007, causing a decline in physical book circulation, requiring adjustments to resource allocation, collection development strategies (from owning to leasing), and frontline customer services skills. Today’s webinar was not about those developments, but it was about change and technological change. And librarians and libraries, based on my 25 year involvement with them, have grown increasingly adaptable because the digital shift has forced them to abandon or modify just about everything - staffing levels and skills, space, collections, and services. No part of the library remains unchanged, including the profession’s attitudes and orientation to change.
But what do these macro forces and academic integrity have to do with libraries? In short, everything. Academic integrity, especially right now, is a problem many institutions don’t know how to solve, but librarians have been involved in this space as informants, counselors, educators, detectors, and policy advisors.
My experience is that librarians also lead best through collaboration, and librarians have the skills and the approach to help their institutions figure out how to move forward. It was great to be part of this panel discussing how libraries are leading the academic integrity conversation.