This poster focuses on the increasingly problematic, but veiled influence of crowd-sourcing ‘study aid’ web platforms on academic integrity. Students of all levels and subjects are sharing their academic course materials through a growing network of ‘study aid’ web platforms like CourseHero.com. Websites like Coursehero.com advertise themselves as providers of “course-specific study materials,” but in common practice they represent platforms for the sharing of completed coursework. Students know that these platforms offer the space to trade notes, essays, homework assignments, even test question and answer sets with the intention of submitting the work of others as their own. These websites facilitate the crowd-sourced exchange of coursework, and effectively support plagiarism. However, apart from popular and professional academic media, little scholarly attention is paid to theses platforms. Virtually no rigorous, actionable scholarly data exists concerning the scope or extent of coursework shared through these platforms.
This poster presents the work of two studies that attempt to measure the frequency and kind of coursework uploaded onto CourseHero.com using ERAU’s “Course Villain” software. The first study of coursework upload frequency (manuscript currently under review at Journal of Academic Ethics) failed to produce a clear or meaningful measurement of how much or frequently coursework was uploaded, but demonstrates the methodological challenges of monitoring such space and the importance of continued study. The second, ongoing study (final results expected May 2020) surveys the kind of General Education subject documents and coursework are being shared on CourseHero.com to measure the extent to which course templates are compromised. The apparent widespread use of these crowd-sourcing ‘study aid’ websites and results these studies’ experiments demonstrate that addressing these issues is an important step into measuring the impact of these wellsprings of academically dishonest behavior.
This poster also presents the development of “Couse Villain,” a custom web crawler used as the data collection mechanism for the aforementioned studies. “Course Villain” is designed to actively monitor the distribution of material uploaded to CourseHero.com, and allows users to generate custom queries, generate aggregate reports of new query matches, review matches, and help auto-populate CoureHero.com’s “Copyright Infringement Policy” document. The poster offers the audience a brief description of the program and its basic functions, as well as a discussion of its roles in plagiarism research and ERAU’s culture of academic integrity.