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You’re sure to support our strong belief in the importance of continuously improving the user experience. This is what our team has been working on lately. Let’s add a bit of drum roll 😊🥁

Paper checking has become more hassle-free for all educators and students using Unicheck in Canvas LMS. How? You’re now able to access Unicheck’s native functionality from within Canvas. This will unlock manual checking for similarity and self-checks for students.

We’ve also rolled out Template Exclusion, which allows you to exclude any text matching a worksheet document used in student submissions. This update will make paper checking more accurate.

Picture an innovative, student-centered institution. What could it be like? A college with robots as teaching assistants? Or a vast university with campuses scattered across the state, with modern technology raising the next generation of citizens?

While some are drawing futuristic pictures, others may be thinking of real-life examples. One of them is the Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education (ITESM).

You’ve been under a lot of stress lately, searching for ways to maintain a stable work environment. To help in this area, we’ve continued to enhance the Unicheck engine as well as its server capabilities.

Our team is currently receiving many customer requests related to license expansion or opening new ones. Given that all the work you’re doing has migrated online, we do realize that service scalability has also gained urgency. Here’s something that can reassure you that checking piles of student submissions remains unaffected, stats taken from our system:

A novel coronavirus pandemic continues to cause a stir. COVID-19 cases are said to be spreading like wildfire and will reach a global peak before everything starts to slow down.

According to the official statement made by the World Health Organization, the pandemic outside China has grown 13-fold, which is a clear sign that academic institutions across the world will have to suspend studies or switch to online instruction.

Meanwhile, dozens of colleges and universities in the US, as well as the 27 EU countries and the UK, have chosen to close in-person classes until late March or early April.

According to the BBC news, “one in seven is paying for university essays.” To combat the booming economy of essay mills, quicker collective action must be taken to raise the standards for academic integrity, which the International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI) is highly committed to.

Founded back in 1992, ICAI has been helping academic institutions increase integrity, foster communication, evaluate resources, and share advice on how to establish an open and trusting academic community.

The Unicheck team reached out to Teresa Fishman, PhD in Rhetoric and Composition, educator, consultant, and the former Director of ICAI, and asked her about how universities and colleges are facilitating students’ integrity, what teachers can do to discourage cheating, how academic integrity can be achieved in e-learning, and what can inspire students to adopt the mindset of a critical thinker.

Read on to see what she had to say.

Going into the future, data privacy will be a major concern for many of the K-12 and higher education institutions. We’ve touched on the issue in this post, and the 2019 Data Breach Investigations Report has revealed the data collected from 86 countries. As it turned out, education remains almost as vulnerable as healthcare, with 99 of 382 registered incidents that resulted in the data disclosure.

The most popular attacks included web app errors, phishing emails, data privacy infringement, and ransomware.

Believe it or not, you all keep driving us forward, and this year is no exception.

During 2019, we brought many solid updates to Unicheck, from the Similarity Report renewal to the launch of Modifind and Emma.

With winter holidays approaching quickly, we wanted to recollect on what’s been done. If you’ve missed anything this year, now’s the time for us to get on the same page.

BTW: At the end of this post, you’ll see some our upcoming enhancements. You’re welcome to suggest any additional milestones for 2020 by
filling out a simple survey 😊