One of the challenges of preventing student plagiarism is that students often are not entirely clear on what constitutes plagiarism, so educating them about plagiarism is an important step.
Rena Palloff and Keith Pratt, coauthors of numerous online learning books, including Lessons from the Virtual Classroom: The Realities of Online Teaching (2013), recommend using plagiarism detection software to help students better understand plagiarism.
“We both use some of the plagiarism detection tools such as Turnitin as teaching tools rather than as punitive, gotcha kinds of tools,” Palloff says. “We will have students run their papers through Turnitin, and look at the score and at instances where plagiarism have occurred in the paper and give them the opportunity to rewrite those sections.”
