In November 2017, I had the pleasure of visiting Kosovo to speak about student plagiarism. This formed part of the Council of Europe’s work as part of the Pan-European Platform on Ethics, Transparency and Integrity in Education (ETINED) and also allowed me to talk about some of the SEEPPAI research I’ve been involved with.
I spoke at two universities, answered questions and invited discussion for what look to be difficult issues for Kosovo. There seems to have been little attention paid to plagiarism in education in Kosovo before. I see this as a vital discussion for the future.
I was particularly heartened to see students joining the events and sharing their ideas for future change.
The slides I used .
The slides deliberately approached both plagiarism and academic integrity as concepts that I did not expect everyone in the audience to be familiar with. That means that they may look relatively basic to experienced audiences when compared to my regular presentations. The questions asked showed that the expectation of starting from a low shared knowledge base was the correct one.
The first of the two talks was featured as a news report on the national TV evening news. Unfortunately, the report also shows a small audience, looking even smaller than it really was based on the angle the TV crew chose to show the audience from. The talk the following day was much better attended, with some audience members saying they had seen the coverage the previous day.
There is further online coverage about the presentation in Pristina here and the presentation in Prizren here.
There are still more discussions to be had and I look forward to being further part of the movement aiming at promoting academic integrity in Kosovo.