Rethinking academic tasks as a way to fight against cyber-plagiarism in higher edcuaction El rediseño de las tareas académicas como forma de combatir el ciberplagio en la universidad

The phenomenon of cyber-plagiarism has already been described by many authors (Cavanillas, 2008; Comas et al., 2011; Jones, 2009; Rowe, 2004; Underwood and Szabo, 2003), who have pointed out both the reasons that cause it and the measures to reduce this practice taking into account different points of view -institutional, academic and ethical measures, among others. This work aims to 1 isabel.tello@cud.upct.es +34 676801514 Centro Universitario de la Defensa Universidad Politécnica de Cartagena, Cartagena, España. https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7533-1064 https://scholar.google.es/citations?hl=en&user=8bTp5BoAAAAJ https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Isabel_Tello2/research 2 Cinta Gallent Torres2 cinta.gallent@campusviu.es +34 669606571 Universidad de Valencia, España draw attention to the responsibility that could be ascribed to faculty when talking about cyber-plagiarism at online university studies. Instructors have in their hands the possibility of counteracting academic dishonesty by improving the tasks they give to students as deterrence to fraud and malpractice. To this end, we suggest some ideas to rethink tasks and assignments to make them more motivating and engaging to students. These recommendations stress creativity, personal reflection, and the use of any kind of (educational) technologies as measures to fight cyber-plagiarism at online university studies.

Instructors have in their hands the possibility of counteracting academic dishonesty by improving the tasks they give to students as deterrence to fraud and malpractice. To this end, we suggest some ideas to rethink tasks and assignments to make them more motivating and engaging to students. These recommendations stress creativity, personal reflection, and the use of any kind of (educational) technologies as measures to fight cyber-plagiarism at online university studies.

INTRODUCTION
Academic cyber-plagiarism, also called academic dishonesty, is a concept that encompasses fraud, electronic tools and education. In Jones's words, cyber-plagiarism refers to "cutting and pasting material from the Internet instead of writing in one's own words", which becomes "a new twist on the age-old problem" (2009, p. 17). Plagiarism has always existed, but cyber-plagiarism is a practice that has grown during the past years at a fast pace due to the unlimited access to information on the Internet. As Underwood and Szabo point out, "the Internet has changed the dynamics of dishonest academic practice; access is no longer for the knowing few but is there for the majority" (2003, p. 469). Cyber-plagiarism, thus, not only refers to the appropriation of digital written texts, but to any material such as videos, audios, images, datasets, spreadsheets, PowerPoint slides, computer codes, etc.
Students are asked to do tasks, projects, and assignments by using the Internet, and sometimes the line between a legal or an illicit behavior is not always clear. In fact, crossing the line and copying information without citing the original source is very simple. Hence, it is not only essential to teach citation techniques and strategies to paraphrase and incorporate quotations correctly, but to commission students with tasks and assignments which will discourage cyber-plagiarism. This leads us to reflect on (i) the type of tasks instructors design, (ii) the need to set and plan more meaningful tasks and (iii) how these tasks can prevent resorting to dishonest actions when using the Internet.
Certainly, the development of ICTs forces higher education institutions to control the use of digital resources (particularly in academic tasks and exams) and encourage the university community to use these resources with integrity, which must be one of the most important values in education. Needless to say that if students leave the university with a diploma, they have to earn it without basing their success on other people's work.

E-LEARNING AND CYBER-PLAGIARISM
Online learning is often associated with a more autonomous and depersonalized education, a fact which is supposed to favor cyber-plagiarism (Dickey, 2004;Harris, 2012;Howard, 2007;Pardo Iranzo, 2014;Pavlakis and Kaitelidou, 2012;Underwood and Szabo, 2003).  Darwish and Sadeqi, 2016;Dawson, 2004;Devlin and Gray, 2007;Dordoy, 2002;Mahabeer and Pirtheepal, 2019;Park, 2003;Reducindo et al., 2017;Ronda-Pérez et al., 2015;Sentleng and King, 2012). Some factors that would encourage cyber-plagiarism, especially when talking about e-learning education, may be added to these, as the students' sense of distance from their instructors and the belief that the information on the Internet does not belong to anybody and can be used in any way.

PLAGIARISM
Academic tasks using technology and being related to the real world are proven to increase students' involvement in the contents explained (Angelo and Cross, 1993;Forte and Bruckman, 2006;Holley and Boyle, 2012;Fernández et al., 2017;Salgaonkar and Divate, 2017 (2018) suggested that "universities could take certain measures such as reducing the groups of students for each teacher so that they can spend more time assessing the originality of the work" (para. 9). Focusing on assessment activities, Olt (2002) and Davids and Waghid (2017) recommended they should be embedded in the learning experience, avoiding standardized, long assessment activities and implementing purposefulness.
As shown in this brief review, studies dealing with the role of faculty and tasks agree on the idea that designing more motivating work can be a weapon against plagiarism.

INSTITUTIONAL LEVEL?
Universities that openly deal with (  Could the process of copying, editing, or re-reading these collages become a meaningful learning experience for students? Some authors point directly to the feasibility of making students work with texts copied from the internet (Jones, 2009;Lessig, 2004). They focus on the use of copy and paste in a creative and rewarding way, for example, by making students compare different fragments of copied texts and draw a critical opinion.
All in all, faculty's attitude towards change will make the difference. The more willing to rethink and reshape tasks, the more motivated students will be as well.
Undoubtedly, this will help students to carry out the assignments in a different spirit.

CONCLUSION
The above ideas will lead us to reflect on how tasks, assignments and exams could be more challenging and meaningful for our students.
Nevertheless, they need to be developed to adapt to the specific competences and learning outcomes of each course. Implementing these ideas will allow instructors to find out whether reassessing and redesigning tasks makes our students less prone to cyber-plagiarize. In a future work, these results will be compared to those obtained from the accomplishment of tasks and assignments with the traditional approach.
Reflecting on the tasks and assignments we give our students can only be worthwhile if there is a real awareness of its usefulness and a critical and responsible determination. Instructors must communicate what they want to achieve with the tasks and what they want to avoid as the only way to make students assimilate their share of responsibility. If we want our tasks to encourage reflection and personal contribution, we must show our students that we also devoted time and reflection to the design of those tasks.
The nature of distance learning frequently encourages cheating more than face-to-face education, but we cannot stop the advance of technological means that make education increasingly global and within the reach of more people. Underwood and Szabo (2003) state that "the range of dishonest practice is limited only by students' abilities to use technology creatively" (p. 470). In this case, why not use our students' supposed creativity to our own advantage?
The way instructors plan tasks to counteract cyber-plagiarism should be just one of the aspects within a wider anti-plagiarism strategy, which will be aimed at educating the whole university community. Teachers not only need to be trained to rethink their tasks, they must also be able to convey to students that cyberplagiarism is a dishonest act.