Section 04. Avoiding Plagiarism

One strategy for success in OPEN courses is to be aware of American academic culture. You may find that some aspects of these courses are different from how you are used to learning in your own country. For example, in American academic culture, plagiarism is an important issue.

Plagiarism is the use of ideas, information, or words that you read without giving credit to the source. Most of the time, plagiarism is unintentional, but even if you don't mean to take credit for other people's work, you still have to be careful to give credit to any resource you use when writing or creating material, even in an online discussion.

The course participants will get the most out of discussions with their peers if they write up their responses based on their own personal experiences and opinions. Since their peers will be responding, including uncredited information from an outside source may take the discussion off topic.

Below are some tips for avoiding plagiarism during our MOOC course.

Citing Sources

Giving credit, or citing a source, means that you show whose ideas you used in your writing. According to the Purdue Online Writing Lab (2016), “When citing, provide the author’s name when you first introduce your quote, summary or paraphrase of his or her text (e.g., ‘Harris writes,’ ‘According to Rodriguez’).”

Here is an example of an in-text citation:

Learner-centered instruction fosters autonomous learning and a sense of ownership over the learning experience, resulting in higher participation and more collaboration between participants (Brown, 2007, p. 52).

According to Harmer (2007, p. 51), Task-Based Learning (TBL) “is a natural extension of communicative language teaching. In TBL, the emphasis is on the task rather than the language."

What type of information needs a citation?

You must cite the source of any information that is not common knowledge. An example of common knowledge is that the sky is blue. So, if you want to include any specific information that you learned while reading or studying, you must cite the source of that information. This rule applies to quoting, summarizing, and paraphrasing other sources in discussions and assignments. You can encourage MOOC participants to use these strategies.