 So, very welcome today to a webinar, which is going to be lead by two students, Oraz Mirado and Megan O'Connor. And they are going to talk about today is celebrating the European year of youth through academic integrity, how students help in establishing institutional integrity and values. So without further ado, actually, I am going to to leave the floor to the two of you. Would you like to introduce yourself first, and then perhaps just give us a broader discussion. I'm really looking forward to what you have to say, because students are such an important part of them. Keep that great. Yeah. Anyways, the slide that we contain and the other information I'm going to talk about is just for the background. So, yeah, I'm a bachelor's student, and I'm working on integrity issues, both within ESO and have been involved in some integrity issue work before at my home university in Belarus. Yeah, and I also wanted from the beginning to mention that we would appreciate if you would write your questions in there. In the Q&A, as Sonja mentioned, so we can recap and also answer to them in the end of our little presentation. We will try to not to bore you. It's going to be really interesting. Bear with us. And yeah, another presentation, I would give the word to Megan to present her and then we can proceed with the presentation of the organizations we are working for. Thank you so much for us. So my name is Megan O'Connor. A lot of people before I am the former vice president for acting affairs with uni students in our international former education in a local institution. So I'm now currently working as a full time nurse, but I'm still a huge fan of all that's being done in the academic integrity space around the world. So I'm just very happy to come along and let my support to work as the work that she's doing. Can you press the next slide? Yeah, so today's topic is how students help to establish institutional integrity. And what is the role of other stakeholders in that? And we'll start with the introduction to ESO and what this organization is doing. ESO is the European Students Union East. And it's an umbrella organization of 45 National Unions of Students from different European countries. And it works on European lobby for students' interests in high education policy. And it was founded in 1982. So it's a very old organization. And ESO is one of the key stakeholders of Bologna process. I'm not sure if you're aware of what ESO is that, but it's basically about European common higher education policy area, which is beyond EU and includes many other countries. Yeah, could you. As is work on academic integrity. It's since the academic integrity itself is quite a new area, I would say for collaboration between NGOs on the European level, and students involved, and since other things that students involve involvement in this area is very important, as it engages with international organizations working on integrity and ethics issues, such as NIE, which is European Network for academic integrity, ATINET platform of Council of Europe. And we represent their students' perspective on academic integrity issues. We also participate in drafting documents on academic integrity, and also researching the matter together with different organizations. For example, we had a project called frauds. And we basically made a questionnaire of around 3000 students on different topics of academic integrity. And then to provide a background in the Irish context, which I've been a part of for the last few years, National Academic Integrity Network was set up in 2018. And it was focused on asking institutions to act to be engaged with the challenges that are being presented by academic misconduct or a better culture of academic integrity among providers, and develop the national resources and tools to address those challenges and issues. So collectively, they have done in the last three years, it's just coming up to their third birthday. And last year, they launched an academic integrity guidelines, following extensive consultation process, education institutions, students, staff, and a broad range of external stakeholders, along with all of the international data that's been made available by our colleagues around the world. There was also a complete which informed that. And all of these are hyperlinked in this slide, if you want to. So basically, what they're doing is they're offering advice on not just how to uphold academic integrity, and also how to deal with those academic misconduct when they arise. So I think everyone here is very familiar with what our understanding is, but I always kind of come back to it because unless everyone's on the same page that's used across institutions and at a national level, especially, I think that it's really be able to adjust it. I saw a fantastic presentation by Sarah Eaton where you're not dealing with a case of academic integrity, you're dealing with a case of academic misconduct itself is academic integrity. And I think that that language that we use is really important to moving forward. On a best question, why do students engage in academic misconduct? Sometimes they don't realise what and what is that down to? Is it down to the students not being educated sufficiently in the area and different programs and policies in place? Sometimes students are completely overwhelmed with their workload. Taking the academic knowledge to recognise when they're plagiarising or engaging in other forms of misconduct. They are unable to manage their time and it's something that they haven't practised previous to their education. Of course, everyone's human, they might have personal issues such as illness or bereavement, fear or failure are also we've seen a huge increase in targeted advertising. Students, if you see the insane work that's really happened with online file sharing, work that check is done and stuff, it's really targeting students when they're at their most vulnerable, we see a lot of that. So you can understand how easy it is for a student to fall victim to this. And to promote academic integrity, I think we all hold a level of responsibility, hold our quality assurance processes. And unless there is a multi-stake, I don't believe that we can overcome the issues that we're faced with across the sector at the moment. Students, teaching and administration staff, management and of course as well the communication systems around the world. Yeah, talking about academic integrity. At this point, we cannot ignore the fact that many of our lives and dimensions of both higher education and academic integrity itself was impacted by COVID. And it's important to underline that COVID accelerated change in higher education, which was actually long awaited because finally, all those digitalization policies started suddenly working and many, many universities and countries in a very short terms, implemented many changes into the classrooms and teaching and learning and both assessment was also one of the mostly influenced areas by COVID and digitalization. So when the switch to digitalization happened, many decisions made were in kind of a hurry because there was no, no actually common instruments, interoperable instruments to use for the universities in place. This cost, not cost, this was actually this created a new market of online assessment tools. And there was a huge competition between them. And this was a big factor of commodification, which we don't like, because it's bad. And it also impacted mental and physical health of everyone who's involved in this drastically change of academic lifestyle. And this includes all those students, teachers, administrators who had to work distantly. And yeah, and as I already mentioned, new learning and teaching environments, where many skills which were before useful for the classroom teaching and learning was no longer usable for the online environment. And this posed a lot of questions to many actors in higher education. Can you list? Yeah. And one of these questions is proctoring and control. Yeah, proctoring tools were in place before the COVID actually came. They were always there. But when COVID imposed the question of what to do with the assessment and how to ensure that students are being assessed fairly and they actually get the marks they deserve. It was quite an easy solution for many questions. And although there were many questions about the effectiveness of this method of assessment at the online exams, this was being used until certain point in many countries. In some countries, it is still being used. And it also depends from university to university. And what does this mean? This mean that in search for fair assessment for the online teaching and learning environment, we started using before answering instruments. And this posed many questions. For example, accessibility. Accessibility for the neurodivergent students at the exams who experience anxiety, even without this kind of stress, and it's already too much for them. Or when artificial intelligence was being used during the proctoring of the exams, this posed also additional stress for their people because their eyes were moving on the screen. And possibly this might potentially cause some problems for the students because this could be considered as an attempt to cheat or the signs of cheating. So in that setting, we should also understand that what if the way students learn was higher order, about which we're going to talk a bit later. And exams conducted were in the nearest to the reality setting where they're always open sources. One can consult. And the exams are the actual tasks. And one will be doing at the future work, be that at the offices and factories or scientific work. And is the encyclopedic and factual knowledge still of high relevance for humans to memorize when these all basically can be delegated to IT systems and artificial intelligence. And in that case, should surveillance and control prevail over specially designed teaching and learning and valuation of actual work skills, where cheating is almost impossible. Is the digitalization challenge necessarily implies with the control, such as e proctoring, especially with involvement of artificial intelligence, is the usage of artificial intelligence by external actors to observe the personal room of a student who was to be treated with trust and respect. And according to the fundamental values of integrity, and justifiable the higher risk of cheating online exams, and will students create their teachers with you trust and respect after that, can they approach their teachers in case of unintended misconduct with openness? Are they still in one community? Is this method of control inclusive, as I already mentioned towards new divergent students, or students with just higher level of anxiety due to serious of exams happening at the same time? And can this actually influence the final results students can get? Because if you're nervous, you tend to forget things and you learned, which can in the end, and yeah, bring bring to the unfair assessment. I think we can go to the next mental health and misconduct behavior. Actually, there is a term called misconduct behavior. And I was actually like, I first heard that at the best practice conference of the Council of Europe, it's in a platform. And the researcher from the Netherlands was actually researching the misconduct behavior and the like higher level of stress for the scientists writing some project on academic research. And but still after that, I searched for mental health and misconduct behavior, researchers for actually students. And I realized that there is big gap between students and researchers in that case. And I think it's nice to talk about that and to empower those researchers who actually want to get more knowledge on that because I think it would be ignorant to say that mental health is not influencing misconduct behavior at all. And talking about mental health, we should also understand that students life situation in general, in general is important, and it can influence their behavior in academia, not only misconduct behavior, but any other behavior where students motivation is lower because they have students poverty going on where they have to work additionally, and they cannot earn enough money to cover their basic needs. Meaning the current situation students are facing in many countries, or performance enhancing drugs or substances. And this area is actually not really discovered and researched, especially in Europe. And we should all understand and come to the common understanding. What is that is actually about? Is it a cheating to use them and how to help to get rid of the stigma on the people who can who might get addicted to those sequences? And all in all lack of mental health culture where people don't use mental health issues as explanation for some complex situations where they cannot actually solve it without solving the mental health issues. Where do we put the, and this necessarily implies that in different societies, we of course had different understanding of what what is the academic achievement. And the societal pressure which which is caused by the societal beliefs or even values that the students need to get all the best marks. And parents telling that this is very important. And in some cases, you are either getting the best mark or you are not you are not getting the mark at all. And why why is everything linked to the marks and not the actual knowledge one should get during the studying periods. And this all forces the question where do we put our value as a society and how is the societal pressure influences students understanding of academic achievements? And what happens when institutions are also led by those values and the policies written are actually all about assessments with links to the grades? And can students really leave their parents? And this is also a very important question because the parents, even if they are really far away, how they taught us to understand the achievements during the schools and the school system from the kindergarten, I think it's the very important question to understand how we grew up. And the parents are playing big role in it. Yeah. Sorry, you think I'd remember to unmute myself online presentations. But the next we're going to go on to the student partnership and teach you and learn. And again, I think the conversations surrounding partnership in this area is a really, really important one. Again, taking inspiration from another webinar I attended on a similar topic. The question, you know, how do we change the conversation from how do we stop students cheating to how do we ensure a student? And I think it was it was a really, really good question, because ultimately, we need students to end and be able to implement their learning and practice and not just to reiterate what's been said in the paper. And breaches of academic integrity are a moral issue. They're a policy, of course, a teaching and learning issue. So how do we achieve a higher order? Communication and partnership between staff and students is a vital part of ensuring that we make some assessment practices. And as part of those qualifications, good, usually find staff and students who are more engaged in the offering students opportunities to practice their skills to reformative assess, consideration of students from different backgrounds, as Oris alluded to earlier, and also the feedback loop. So if a lecturer is offering feedback on an assessment, be able to engage in that feedback in the future and be able to really learn from it and practice the skills and the song and understanding the purpose of each of their assessments and understanding different types of assessments. And then of course, trust and open dialogue, a model of quality assurance structures. I think that again, conversation that we're having is about those quality assurance processes within institutions taken as a priority for senior management, because I think this is something that at this point should be on the risk-gradification and pretty high op-ed of that. So we'll see how we go with deterring academic misconduct. Again, we're talking about the culture of honesty and conversations, which have been really fantastically spearheaded by our colleagues in the University policies supported by procedures and ensuring things are fit for practice and mitigating against contract cheating. The students that engage in academic misconduct, they're not always, they're usually aware of the risks, those risks that you're getting caught, feedback on work that you yourself haven't completed and missing out on that learning opportunity. For many, it's considered a better option than the risk of not doing well, whereas I've already taught perhaps not doing well in education, being under pressure from different external sources, but also the barriers to education serve as a huge part of that in terms of the possible living and things like that. So I think that a long time, the discussions around academic integrity at an institutional level, where institutions detect misconduct, how do we catch the students? But we know from the research that's been done, especially since we came into this new digital era, that institutions are a percentage of misconduct that actually occurs. We need to ensure that that culture is forward and improved, and that the policies really support the procedures and allow the implementation of the policies themselves. When we're talking about detection and sanctioning of academic misconduct, we should absolutely ensure that all of the policies are accessible, that they're applicable, that they're included in consultation with the students on the ground. And we need to ensure that educators individually are taking steps to mitigate against the risks of the likes of contract cheating, and looking at how this can be put within the institution, preventative measures can be put in place. So with responding to a hugely important aspect of all of this is how we respond to when these issues occur, the variety of levels of seriousness, but we are all human and sometimes we can make and students deserve the opportunity to reflect and learn from theirs, no matter what the consequences. Students might learn their lesson when they disciplined, when they're caught, but are we ensuring that we do that they know better and that they're better equipped to deal with the situation they found themselves in, to take the risk of participating in academic dishonesty. We should really try and learn the students point of views and consider their motivations coming back to the point of mitigating the risks. Were the students completely overwhelmed by a seemingly impossible workload? Can we look at assessment, working together and collaboration between departments? And did the students really see what they were doing? Did they feel like they had no other choice? And do you know where the students can reach out? I think all of these questions really deserve to be answered, will be supported by institutions over time, but we need to ensure that we maintain and improve this area. So the students were moving forward. I think the students' integration of those policies is vital. I think I've said it two or three times now. The experience in the current higher education landscape is drastically different to that of students four or five, six years ago. I think that if we don't have conversations in those consultations and be prepared to both update our policies and implement, we really need to ensure that that is a first priority. New sophisticated ways of contracting, online file sharing, and so much more. And for sure, we are finally at a point where we're seeing students are able to recognise when this is happening, the campaigns that have been run by the network, and particularly the students' unions who have been really, really strong points of contact for students for running campaigns and things like that. And while the students, it poses a really serious threat to the quality assurance and higher education globally. So if anyone has any questions, please just write a hand, write in the chat. I hope it works now or send it in the Q&A. I can also unmute you if you would like to just let me know in one way or another. And thank you, Megan and Ores, for this amazing presentation. You really touched upon so many important things regarding student participation. And I think it's, I agree with you, definitely this is extremely important to include students in the work because otherwise, and you always have such good ideas. I really think that the one question I think is very important that Ores touched upon is the mental health issues and the connection to academic integrity. Because I know that many students can be really triggered also by having to go to the disciplinary board, not least. So we need to be very careful how we handle that type questions and in order to make, not to make things even worse for them. So yes, do you have any ideas how to have you got any input from students regarding those issues? Yeah. There is, as I already mentioned, there is lack of research. And there is a certain link between PhD students. I don't remember this researcher's name, but he's from the Netherlands and I think he's from the Erasmus University. And he mentioned that the research show that there is a link between misconduct behavior and the highest stress PhD students are having while writing their final work. And I think this has also some links with also students and how they are approaching their studies and also assessment and also higher societal expectations from students. And yeah, not all parents are actually having health, female mental health culture where they can understand that not always one has to get the best marks, not always one has to get the best achievements. And yeah, depression is also how we understand the achievements. And also I think mental health doesn't always mean, doesn't always mean reacting to the mental health issues, but it's also about the certain way of seeing the world through mental health. When you can say that if the person, when you can see that if the person cannot participate at some exams and at the moment, it's not anyhow linked to any certificate, for example, from a doctor saying that this person cannot go can be just that the person is really weak and cannot just go today to this exam, even if he or she or they like were well prepared for that. And it should be clear that it should not be that complex to register. And I know from my own case, at my university in Germany, it's certain that the registration and registration for the exams has their deadlines, and one cannot just be registered after the deadline. This is one issue. And also in order to prove that your reason not coming to the exam was eligible, you need to bring some papers saying that you were actually having health issues, which is not always the case. You don't have to have the paper proof. If you're just feeling bad. I'm not as well in supporting students mental health when you're going through disciplinary procedures and following cases of academic misconduct. And I think interesting with that is just the transparency of processes and ensuring that those processes are accessible. When students, if you know our student representatives aren't aware of this and can't see and understand exactly what that process is, then we can't expect the regular student to give institutional policies on a day to day basis. So I think that that is a really important managing pressures where students may already be struggling with their mental health and then facing into a preliminary procedure, but also ensuring that that student has some kind of support that we're kind of left in a room alone, so that they have a designated person in that room that is there for them to fight their corner and ensure that they're aware of the right thing to do, so be that big staff member within the institution, be it a student representative or whatever fits an institutional level, things like that can make a really, really big difference. And just to say it in terms of the flexibility and accommodations with assessments, if we were a little bit in love with each other and left a little bit more room for people to have bad days, space for people to come forward and say, like, I really can't do this at the moment and making space. I think it would eliminate a whole corner of academic dishonesty globally. And I think my experience, I won't say it too broadly. I'll say I think people pry themselves in the difficulty of academia sometimes. You can see that in teachers and as a student, you think that maybe that's the way that it should be. It should be that. And it makes it far more difficult to then engage when you need help because, oh, all students, mental health is meant to be bad. This is meant to be a really difficult time. But your mental not, you shouldn't be challenging your mental health, though your own personal well-being. So I think conversations on a day-to-day basis and ensuring that the policies and procedures are not just filled with jargon and a big book on a shelf somewhere. Yes. And you both mentioned the importance of students' involvement in creating policies and procedures. And I think that is really, really is the key because this must be done in a dialogue and a conversation. We got the comment in a chat from Ditta, the mutual trust between the teacher and students is so important. A few days ago, I had an interview with a respectable professor, and she mentioned the same thing. So it's great to see that this resonates across generations. That is, that it is seen as important on both sides. And also, I'm happy that you mentioned that the technology can break into this fragile trust relationship. Yeah, absolutely. And I think as well, in terms of technology, the experience that everyone had, not to keep going back to it, but I mean, March 2020, as I doubt. And while students were unprepared to deal with all of these new technological, for most staff. And I think that there was a period of kind of trying to be able to assess students for their end of your exams then, and this procedure is technology that was implemented at that point in a manner that would never otherwise. And, you know, when we talk about the different types of online proctoring, the successes and the failure. And, you know, we talk about, you know, student data and how it should be used and how I don't think that anybody was coming from a bad place there. But I think most of us of a situation where that went very badly and where maybe a student's privacy impinged upon or but they had a very negative experience with it. And I think just like it was and that it was no fault of anyone. It was unprecedented times. But I think sometimes issues can lead onwards when there may be not a dresser or put to bed or policies and procedures can people can try and prove them that they weren't the wrong thing to do, like them as opposed to taking a step back. So I think that the whole technology question loose minefield. But I think that it is something that is now part of the operation. I don't think it's going to go away. I also think some of the more knowing that we can take a step back to is really important and maybe accepting when things don't work well. But I think that you know, sometimes we're very concerned about the threat to academic and integrity or by saying that something didn't work as well as we wanted it to. But in fact, I would have much stronger belief in a system that says, OK, this didn't work in the way that we thought try something different. And I think that that's easier said than done. Very easy for me to say as a responsibility as an educator. But that's what I'd love to see as a student. I'd love to speak. Let's let's try something different because this didn't work in the way that we wanted it to. What academia is about, it's about teaching and learning and changing as we move forward. And I think we embrace that and the administration and management side of things may be a little bit more although again. Yeah, and I'd also give an example of how the trust can be destroyed by technology. And I found quite, I don't know, conservative, but in my home home university in Belarus, we had a situation where the micro headphones were widely used. And I haven't heard of them since I moved to Europe. And I'm happy about that. But basically what I was trying to understand why students are getting involved in this kind of behavior. But I also faced so many cases, students telling how they didn't actually use this micro headphones, but teachers at the exams were so suspicious that they were actually like so suspicious that they were not trusting and believing that the student can actually say and produce this kind of knowledge. And yeah, many students who actually didn't use any kind of technology suffered from that a lot. And also many students who actually used it, they had really nice marks. And I think it's a very absurd situation. I'm hopeful that it's not going to happen anywhere in Europe, but it can happen. And I think to in this kind of absurd cases, the state plays also a big role because yeah, this kind of stuff, it's not it's in my mind beyond academic integrity and ethics. It's it's about illegal actions. And I think the advertisement and the ways how this kind of cheating instruments are being promoted need to be controlled by the state. And also we all we always need to remember that we are in the same community and we should in first place trust each other and then see what happens. Yes, I think it's amazing. And I can understand how also false accusations can be really problematic and really drain students from energy or fighting further and do the work right if they are not so that trust is really essential. You touched so many different aspects and as we don't have any more questions, I would like you to give us assignment. And I understand that one assignment assignment you give to us researchers is to focus more on the relationship between mental health and and misconduct, which we already talked, what other assignments do you think we should do? How can we help you as community of researchers and teachers? Give us homework. It's your turn now. I think that the feedback group is a huge one. Definitely look at a little bit more. I mean, again, in terms of research, you try and you try again and with students of unique assignments, they're typically seeking feedback from a professor in terms of where they got and why. But a lot of the time, those processes can be one. And I think if we could have a little bit more of a circular motion in terms of comfort and ability for students to engage in, say, a session that could be on once a week or maybe about assessment practices and how you can do better and have the space to discuss academic integrity issues and give examples of misconduct and ensure that students you're on their side have those more casual conversations outside of just talking. Humanize the whole process. So I think, yeah, it's kind of just making that space for a backup. OK, no, wait, I still don't understand. And I think that that would be. OK, so more feedback, more space for questions and basically more space for academic integrity discussions, apparently. Yeah, exactly. I would also add just to have more just to get that feeling of what what is the mood inside the teachers community, for example, how how is it going with academic integrity there and what like what kind of recommendations and the special researchers have been given so for so many years of being implemented by teachers or by administrations and why is not is that not happening if it's not happening and how could everyone help that help with that because talk. I think the talks about the higher order learning and the open book exams and the exams in a way that you cannot actually cheat have been. Be happened around for so many years, but I think it's still a big, big gap between the implementation and the recommendations. And I think it's also to understand how big is that gap. And I'm not sure if there is all of you required research on that, but I think this would also help to improve the situation. So that sounds like a good suggestion as well, organized teacher training so we can teach teachers how to teach academic integrity because apparently there is some there are some gaps between research and practices. And when you said that I thought directly about using the percentage that comes from text matching software, some guideline, which is, of course, totally, totally wrong as we such have been talking about and discussing for years. And some people still use it as some sort of indicator, which is definitely is not. OK, and I hope that these webinars are also a part of this discussion. And they are going to be published on the ENAI website. I would like to thank Megan and Oroz for today. And before we leave, I would like to invite Rita to tell us more about what's coming next, because she is going to be a host for the next webinar. Rita. Thank you for invitation, Sonia. I'm just sharing with the with everyone the next topic of our webinar. In our next webinar, we are going to present about the victim support portal, which I kindly invite you all to have a look. This portal was recently launched as part of the FATE project, an Erasmus Plus project. And the overall aim is to support anyone who is experiencing an issue of academic or research malpractice. So if you know anyone who is currently struggling advertise our portal, but in the webinar, we are going to talk more in detail about the portal. And also we will have the testimony of someone who was a victim of academic misconduct. We will share her experience, the process that she took the actions taken, how she felt in terms of the support. And this is something that we are going to focus deeply is about the importance of raising awareness on the need for support victims of academic misconduct. So we're here from from her experience and the outcomes of the case. So I invite you all to be a very dynamic webinar in an interview way. So I think it will be very important for everyone. And once again, Megan and Horace, thank you so much for a wonderful webinar and sharing of your experience. We learned so much from you. Definitely. We need your voice. And I would also like, perhaps to if you're a student listening to this, Horace, perhaps you want to say a couple of words about student working group that we have at ENI. Yes. And to join. Yes. We have student working group at ENI. And I think most of the people are there doing PhD research. So I would be really happy if some bachelor students would also join us and bring their experience. And yeah, it's a learning space where we can discuss things we are doing and we want to do and the problems we are seeing at the moment and together work on their solution. I can. I'm not sure if the participants will receive afterwards any information. And I think it's important just to give them my email address so they can just text me if they want to join the working group and we will be more than happy to have more students. So thank you so much once again. It was very interesting and it's always a pleasure to listening to such an engaging group of students, group of two students at least. Yeah, we are definitely if you're a student, join the group. We would like to see more students and because as far as and Megan said, this must be done in a dialogue. We can't achieve a culture of academic integrity without having a dialogue with students. So we learn so much from you. And thank you for the assignments we got as researchers and teachers. And yeah, see you next time with Rita in a mile. Thank you so much.