Coursera has implemented an honor code reminder that students must acknowledge reading before submitting some assignments through the company’s Massive Open Online Course (MMOC), according to a report by tech blog, GigaOm. The implementation comes after reports that dozens of Coursera students were plagiarizing content from Wikipedia and various other sources.
According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, students submitting an essay assignment for peer grading will have to check a box next to a sentence that reads “In accordance with the Honor Code, I certify that my answers here are my own work, and that I appropriately acknowledged all external sources (if any) that were used in this work.”
Since Coursera’s class offerings tend to lean towards computer science and engineering, courses that tend to eschew essay assignments, few classes are presently affected by the decision. ZDNet reported that only three classes currently being offered by Coursera have essay assignments, although Coursera’s catalog lists at least 12 upcoming classes that could reasonably be expected to feature essay assignments.
GigaOM also reported that Coursera has partnered with crowdsourced captioning provider Amara, which will result in Amara’s volunteers translating more than 1,200 lectures distributed by Coursera. While Amara has been providing translation services to Khan Academy since summer 2011, the partnership with Coursera will expose the service to over 1.1 million people in 190 different countries.
Follow Alex Wukman on Twitter @AlexWukmanCMN
Facebook Comments