Distance Education and Plagiarism Prevention at the University of South Carolina Upstate

At the University of South Carolina Upstate, two librarians created a series of workshops to proactively prevent plagiarism. To reach distance education students, online workshops were developed in Blackboard including basic and advanced workshops for lower and upper-level courses. The workshops are intended to introduce students to the concepts related to plagiarism, such as types of plagiarism, academic integrity, paraphrasing, common knowledge, and citations. By looking at the results of the pre-tests, post-tests, and activities, some trends can be observed. It appears that students seem to have the most difficulty with paraphrasing, common knowledge, and citations.