Bringing Abstract Academic Integrity and Ethical Concepts into Real-Life Situations

This paper reports the learning analytics on the initial stages of a large-scale, government-funded project which inducts university students in Hong Kong into consideration of academic integrity and ethics through mobile Augmented Reality (AR) learning trails—Trails of Integrity and Ethics (TIEs)—accessed on smart devices. The trails immerse students in collaborative problem solving tasks centred on ethical dilemmas, addressed in real, actual locations where such dilemmas might arise, with contextually appropriate digital advice and information available on hand. Students play out the consequences of their decisions which help reinforce the links between the theoretical concept of academic integrity and ethics and the practical application in everyday contexts. To evaluate the effectiveness of the TIEs, triangulation of different sets of data is adopted and these datasets include user experience surveys, qualitative feedback, clickstream data, and text mining of pre-/post-trail discussion. Thousands of students’ responses and related data gathered are analysed to ascertain the effectiveness of these mobile learning trails in enhancing students’ awareness of AIE issues. The positive learning outcome of the TIEs suggests that this approach can be adopted and applied to a wider scope of the academic curriculum and co-curriculum.