07/15/2025

Summer Series Post-Blog 4: After Education

by Victoria Malaney-Brown and Allison Riley

The Summer Series of webinars continues the blog takeover with the fourth post-webinar blog. The presenters from Workshop 4: After education on July 11 reflect on the questions and takeaways from their session.

Post-Blog - Allison

I thoroughly enjoyed the webinar last Friday. It is a delight to get to talk about what we do, especially with a group that is as engaged as you all were. I want to take this opportunity to thank ICAI for bringing us all together for this webinar series. Looking back on the word cloud sharing attendees’ positions at their institutions, it is clear that the important work of promoting and supporting academic integrity is being done in many different ways around the world. And so many are working alone, which makes these opportunities to gather and share information even more important.

Word cloud from webinar demonstrating the range of participants' declared roles.

I’d like to follow up on a few of the questions from the webinar beginning with the question of what happens to students who do not attend their required AI Trainings. My response is very similar to Victoria’s. The vast majority of students attend their trainings, regardless of how they may feel about their violation and the sanctions they have been given. Additionally, most students who enter the first day of training reluctantly feel more positively about it by the second meeting. By the end of the last day, almost all students have engaged and feel that they learned something. As I mentioned in my pre-blog, this might come as a surprise to those new to AI education, but it holds true year after year.

For the few who miss a meeting or fail to enroll initially, we put energy into individualized outreach. The ultimate goal for us is, of course, to have students learn, so we do everything we can to give them a chance to do so. AI violations provide an opportunity for a teachable moment, and so do hiccups along the way. Much of the time, absences, non-enrollment or missed assignments have to do with poor time-management, a lack of organization, or perhaps something happening in the student’s life outside of their trainings. So, when those things happen, we typically have students reflect, either through writing or in conversation with one of our Education Coordinators, and think about what caused the issue, what values were neglected, who was affected, and what they could have done differently and can do differently in the future to prevent the same thing from happening. These conversations are also a chance to identify habits and skills that could benefit from further development or challenges the student is experiencing for which they could use support, and for us then to provide resources for their specific needs. We do the same thing for students who have used a GenAI tool without permission for the reflection pieces (another question that was raised during our session). Although we have a very specific policy for appropriate use of GenAI tools for their trainings, we do have some students who fail to use it within the given parameters.  We use these moments as a chance for further conversation and education and may require a rewrite or an in-depth conversation about the content. 

The small number of students who remain reluctant and perhaps outright avoidant will receive repeated personalized outreach. We want an opportunity for a conversation with them as that is usually the most effective action of all. Once we can talk with a student, we can find out their circumstances and usually get to the root of the avoidance. Even when we ultimately have to fail a student for their trainings because we have given them multiple chances and reassignments, if they come back to us years later, we will almost always give them a chance to do the trainings at that time. It can sometimes take someone a while (yes, even years) to fully come to terms with their violation and what led to it, and we respect a student who returns to us wanting to face it and fulfill their responsibilities.

I mentioned in our pre-blog that while we are teaching students integrity and how to make ethical decisions, we are also teaching them tools for becoming better students. This is particularly true in the way we help our students work through obstacles to completing their sanctions.

Post-Blog - Victoria

As Allison mentioned, I had a great time sharing more about After Education with the ICAI community on Friday. For me some of my takeaways in addition to what Allison shared were that even if you have a team or an office of one, you can still create quality After Education programs for your students. I would recommend that you look at your academic integrity process and find ways to build in the support and referrals for students to re-engage with campus resources and partners who can help students learn better ways to write and cite (e.g., Writing Center, Librarians), develop strong templates in emails and in assignments that show empathy and ask students to do the hard work of reflecting on their errors and mistakes to make changes that impact their student success. Ultimately, we want students to do the hard “self-work” of understanding that they are not perfect people, but can do better next time by being more aware of their ethical orientation and values in the world around them. I view our work in after education as part of the student success portfolio, helping students become even stronger students with strong commitment to increasing their communication skills, connecting with faculty, staff, and students around them, actively using tutoring, help rooms, and critically thinking about what they want to achieve in life and use their college-going experience to be intentional to influence their life’s journey and have alignment of personal and professional values.

Dr. Victoria Malaney-Brown is the inaugural Director of Academic Integrity at Columbia University in the City of New York where she supports undergraduates at Columbia College and Columbia Engineering, and she oversees academic integrity programming, orientation, Integrity Week, and the management of educational integrity cases.

Allison Riley oversees all educational programs for the Academic Integrity Office at University of California, San Diego - she designs and delivers preventative education and outreach efforts for students, student staff, career staff and faculty as well as required integrity trainings for students with violations (after ed).

The authors' views are their own.

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