Charles Crook

Given the sophisticated detection tools to stop cheating, it’s unsurprising that the Channel 4 Dispatches documentary turned its attention to the migration from copy-and-paste internet plagiarism to cash-for-drafts “essay mills”. Universities seem relatively blind to this “contract cheating” in which students pay somebody else to do their assignment, but the scale of the business is sobering.

Universities across the world are considering whether to start automatically recording lectures. Some students are voting for it. And the IT industry has created some seductive products to record lectures, a process also known as “lecture capture”. Some onlookers expect a hesitant response from the higher education sector, which is often portrayed as cautious about taking up educational technologies. Yet lobbing new resources into complex settings deserves caution.