newsadvancements and initiatives - Faculty Matters

“University of Phoenix, because of its distributed
population of learners, moved toward a full embrace of
digital content in terms of library and textbooks earlier
than many other institutions and more aggressively,”
says Bickford, who admits going paperless wasn’t
popular. “The main resistance to the digital library at
times has been external, from regulatory authorities or
other organizations that judge universities by a rubric
that calls for a certain number of volumes on a shelf.
In order to open campuses in various states we’ve had
to make a very strong case about the equivalence of
digital library content.”
At first, digital textbooks weren’t a welcome change
for University of Phoenix students, who’ve spent their
academic years highlighting passages of physical
text and making notes in the margins of pages. “We
had to make it clear that our digital textbooks for
the most part allowed annotation, note-taking and
highlighting,” Bickford says. “We worked to improve
those capabilities and better publicize them.”
Unraveling the web of deceit
Christian Storm, co-founder and Chief Technical Officer
of Turnitin.com, struck upon an idea he thought would
be a hit with educators: a web-based service that could
detect plagiarism in students’ papers by comparing
them against an internal database and other sources.
facultymatters.com
“ The main resistance to the digital
library at times has been external,
from regulatory authorities or other
organizations that judge universities by
a rubric that calls for a certain number
of volumes on a shelf.”
— David Bickford, Vice President of Academic Affairs,
University of Phoenix
After Turnitin.com launched in 1998, Storm expected
prestigious universities like Harvard and Stanford to be
the first to subscribe. But Storm says the reverse was
true, leaving him with a sinking realization that some
educational institutions might not want to blow the
cover off their plagiarism troubles because “you have to
deal with the problem once you expose it.” “It’s a kind of
a Catch-22,” Storm says.
Meanwhile, Turnitin.com sparked so much animosity
among students that several high school students sued
the company, claiming it violated their rights under U.S.
copyright law. (The judge ruled in favor of Turnitin.com.)
Once the controversy died down, the company rapidly
grew and its services are now used in more than 100
countries and by more than 5,000 institutions.
Risky business
The experiences of trailblazers hold important life
lessons. “Experimenting can be a frightening process.
We are constantly making mistakes, not knowing
whether we are on the right lines,” Harford writes in his
book, Adapt. “The ability to adapt requires [a] sense of
security, an inner confidence that the cost of failure is a
cost we will be able to bear. Sometimes that takes real
courage; at other times all that is needed is the happy
self-delusion of a lost three-year-old. Whatever its
source, we need that willingness to risk failure. Without
it, we will never truly succeed.”
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