2018 Academic Board forum: Integrity at UTS

Chair's summary

On 10 October 2018, the Academic Board held a forum focused on Integrity at UTS. More than 100 staff and student members attended.

After my welcome to the guests, the UTS context on integrity was provided by the Provost, Professor Andrew Parfitt.

A presentation by Rowena Harper, Associate Director, Curriculum Development and Support (Acting) from University of South Australia then set the scene, focusing on introduction to academic integrity and its landscape with Rowena sharing interesting findings of an Office of Learning and Teaching project on contract cheating and assessment design. Rowena stressed the need to set academic integrity in the context of the wider higher education sector and the changes and pressures that characterise it.

Professor Shirley Alexander, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President (Education and Students) and Professor Kate McGrath, Deputy Vice-Chancellor and Vice-President (Research) highlighted the importance of integrity in teaching, learning and research.

An overview of the Academic Integrity Working Group (AIWG) initiatives by Professor Maryanne Dever followed soon after. The draft definition of academic integrity and the following key ideas of the AIWG was shared for feedback:

integrity and academic integrity need to be adopted as the university’s core language across all activities and materials
new and clear information is needed on UTS’s website — a single source of truth that is easy to find, easily understood and provides navigation to all relevant units, policies, training, support and contacts
there is a need to consider who shares responsibility for building this understanding
there is a need to ensure that UTS’s focus is not solely on students and that the academic staff model the kinds of behaviours expected of students
mandatory online training around academic integrity for all commencing coursework students
if the course approval and reaccreditation processes should ask faculties to articulate for each course what their strategy for building and sustaining academic integrity will be
redesigning assessment
rebuilding the conversation with our students
supporting staff.

A presentation on benchmarking integrity across the sector was provided by the University Librarian Michael Gonzalez, which was followed by an overview of good practice for courses by Director, Institute for Interactive Media and Learning, Associate Professor Jo McKenzie.

Next, student members of Academic Board provided their perspective on importance of integrity followed by a panel discussion with:

Nhan Chiem
Jennifer Green
Bradley Halicek
Daren Maynard.

The forum concluded with case studies on key challenges.

I would like to thank all presenters and attendees for making the discussions productive at the forum. The primary goal of this forum was to bring together key University stakeholders in an open dialogue to discuss the issues facing integrity at universities and to keep the conversation going (#UTSintegrity). As we identified at the forum, it is important that this work has commenced at UTS and further progress updates from the AIWG will be shared in due course.