Taking action on academic integrity at one Australian university

Despite all the work put into writing policies to reduce academic misconduct, all the writing of guidelines for how to acknowledge, and all the declarations of how academic integrity is valued, few Australian universities could say with confidence that they have a holistic, integrated approach to dealing with academic misconduct and academic integrity. One Australian university, for example, has a well-written policy which clearly outlines lecturer responsibilities, yet that university has not monitored whether staff are aware of these responsibilities and if they are implementing them. Given the heavy workload of lecturers, why would lecturers seek out policy and/or bother to carefully read it when it seems peripheral to their research and teaching? Engaging lecturers in the topic of academic integrity requires more than a good policy and a check list. Through a distributed leadership initiative, an action research project in one faculty of this university was set up to engage lecturers in taking on their responsibilities in ways that are appropriate for their practice. In this paper I review the actions taken by the lecturers and reflect on the progress of the project.