I remember all too well. It was an essay I worked on with the enthusiastic dedication of a first year student, endlessly reading research papers to gather information, making sure every comma was exactly at the right place and working nights. Before I handed in my essay, I made sure a dozen people read my essay first to provide feedback, I was going for nothing less than a masterpiece.

When I found out that one of my reviewers, a fellow student, copy-pasted entire paragraphs of my essay, I was furiated. I did not hesitate to step to my college professor and the student was reprimanded for the act.

For me, at the time, it was not hard to speak up and do something about it. But what if the other student was a friend or a more popular student? What if there were very good reasons for him or her to act the way he or she did? Would I have acted in the same way? I am all too aware that research integrity is a grey area and that it is important to educate those in the research field. From young learners at primary school to highly experienced researchers. In my opinion it is not just a matter of ‘knowing’ what is the right thing to do, but also experiencing it and keeping the discussion going, it is a social matter.

Today, I work at Elevate as an instructional designer. In this role I can express my passion for high quality online and blended learning solutions for students and professionals in Health and Life sciences. At Elevate, we strive to stimulate learners to do more than just read and exchange information. Instead our aim is to refine their knowledge. From that point of view, it is important that learners are not limited to reading the information they think they should know. There are greater possibilities, especially with technology and social media, to deepen knowledge when interacting with others.

Social learning is learning from each other: by interacting with others we acquire new knowledge and skills. Social learning underlines the importance of observing and modelling behaviour, attitudes, emotions and reactions of others. Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own abilities to find out what to do.

The subject of research integrity is eminently suited for Elevate’s Learning Platform. We already have experience with teaching in this subject. In one of our small private online courses (SPOCs) we integrated an interactive movie where students are the lead character and make decisions about integrity in research that can have long-term consequences. The decisions relate to responsible conduct of research-topics such as avoiding research misconduct, handling of data and responsible authorship. In the discussion forum, students reflect on the choices they made and share personal experiences regarding research integrity. Some of the students responses to this activity are:

This is a very difficult situation where you may have to take a course of action which will likely also affect you negatively. The main thing to take away from this experience is that it is not an easy path to walk and you should be very confident that what you are doing is the right thing… This is most likely what I would struggle with the most, I would most likely not be able to let it go and seek assistance from a university representative.

Honestly spoken, going through the interactive game caused different thoughts in my mind as in the beginning of my career I saw an almost similar situation… I was irritated and asked another colleague what he thought about this because to me it was not okay and even illegal. The colleague laughed at me and said that this was common practice and that he thought that there was nothing bad about it. Even though I was not directly involved (I was no co-author) in this situation, I was unsettled and had to think about it for a long time.

How to build a trusting online learning environment where students feel confident enough to speak up and share their opinions? We are happy to share our professional experience on this in our next blog.