Learning with students about academic integrity: poster

Abstract

While academic integrity as a specialised profession in higher education is still emerging (Vogt and Eaton, 2022; Mackenzie, 2024), learning developers (LDers) perform many duties to teach and cultivate academic integrity at their institutions. As Bickle, Allen and Mayer (2023, p.1) highlight, many LDers ‘have designed and delivered courses, quizzes, tutorials, and events to promote academic integrity’ and encourage ethical scholarly practices. At their ALDCon23 session about the role of learning development (LD) in academic integrity, Bickle, Allen and Mayer posed questions that are still pressing today, such as, ‘what training do learning developers need?’ and ‘what forms of collaborative cross institutional research on academic integrity would be advantageous?’.

This poster (see Figure 1) responds to Bickle, Allen and Mayer’s session by sharing reflections on a new service our LD team launched in 2023 in partnership with our student conduct office. At our Canadian institution, instructors who report academic misconduct must select one or more ‘resolutions’, and a one-to-one meeting with an LDer is now one option. As LDers have no impact on institutional decisions around misconduct, we have attempted to create a neutral and safe space in these meetings for students to share their experience, deepen their understanding of academic integrity, and develop strategies to help them move forward more confidently in their studies and in contexts beyond higher education. While this model of LDer support is not brand new (Bridgewater, Pounds and Morley, 2019), it remains uncommon in Canada and is worthy of further exploration.