Combating Digital Academic Dishonesty: A Scoping Review of Approaches

E-learning platforms are continuously evolving as a necessary support tool both for e-learning and blended learning in institutions of higher learning. Leveraging on the advancement of the Internet in the last decade, the proliferation of technologically enhanced teaching and learning tools present enormous benefits. Nevertheless, this massive digitization of education is also associated with the challenge of digital misconduct, which has become widespread amongst students, and now threatens academic integrity for blended and unsupervised e-assessments. Consequently, research on mitigating both traditional and digital academic dishonesty is gaining increasing attention in the last two decades. This increase in the volume of research as well as the huge threat that academic dishonesty poses to academic integrity makes it imperative to have a comprehensive and precise understanding of the current mitigating approaches and their corresponding results to guide future research. In an attempt to fill this gap, we conducted a scoping review to 1) determine the amount, focus, and nature of research on students’ digital academic dishonesty; 2) summarize results of current approaches to mitigate academic dishonesty; and 3) articulate a future research direction. Therefore, in this paper, we contribute to the existing body of knowledge by presenting a scoped summary of scholarly studies on academic dishonesty. The results show that the plague of academic dishonesty is both persisted and growing and that a virtue approach is a potent approach in mitigating this threat to academic integrity. As a future research direction, we leveraged on these findings, to propose the ethno-ethics paradigm, which advocates the integration of cultural beliefs into the process of building and enduring culture of academic integrity. Most importantly, our findings are crucial for guiding education policy direction and in shaping the service rendering options of e-learning service providers.