The Internet is a treasure trove of resources to enhance your efforts to incorporate writing into your teaching. It also is a rich source of support for your students.

For Faculty

University of Texas
World Lecture Hall

Are you ever curious about how your counterparts at other schools structure their courses? The World Lecture Hall is a growing collection of syllabi and assignments in 28 fields of study. Don't confine yourself to your specific subject area; a few minutes spent exploring assignments from other fields may generate ideas that match your goals.

Center for Teaching Excellence
Online Teaching Centers around the World

The KU Communication Studies web site includes Online University Teaching Centers: A Worldwide Listing. In the U.S. university category alone are listed professional development services at over 100 universities.

Student Resources

Purdue University
OWL

In the absence of a campus-wide writing laboratory at KU, students will find on-line writing labs (OWLs) helpful. Like everything else on the Web, they vary in quality. We suggest that you encourage your students to begin with Purdue's. In addition to providing useful information, Purdue links with several other OWLs.

School Sucks
www.schoolsucks.com

Of course, with the good comes the problematic. School Sucks is a popular and highly publicized effort in student-paper recycling. This repository of student papers and exams permits easy downloading and printing--a technological advance over dormitory file days. Many papers are, at best, marginal, but perusers may not realize that. As we teach them how to access the Web, the challenge for us becomes to also teach students how to assess their sources and to use them ethically.

Teachers can discourage students from resorting to previously written papers by course-specific assignment design. Continue reading for several strategies KU faculty have used to discourage plagiarism.

Assignment Strategies to Discourage Plagiarism

Effective assignment design discourages plagiarism. Strategies that faculty use to discourage cheating include the following:

1. Assigning papers and projects that depart in structure and content from the traditional research paper
2. Segmenting assignments to time management and the research process
3. Trying assignments to time management and the research process
4. Requireing incorporation of information from teacher-assigned articles with original research
5. Assigning early in the process a prospectus and timetable for the project
6. Requireing submission of an annotated bibliography of the research sources
7. Requesting photocopies of title pages of books or part of an on-line service cited
8. Requireing an oral presentation of the work in progress
9. Asking an exam question that requires students to state and define the thesis of the paper that they have submitted
10. Establishing assignment-specific grading criteria and grading according to them

This page was published by the Writing Consulting staff: James Hartman, Director; Pat McQueeney, Associate Director; Anne Farmer and Angela Jones, Graduate Students Assistants; and Lee G. Hornbrook, Office Manager.