Abstract

Digital media and online learning platforms provide a lot of new opportunities and convenience to learning and teaching. These platforms facilitate collaborative learning to a whole new level and bring new learning experience to students. However, some new online learning platforms also bring new challenges to issues related to academic honesty. Recently, it was found that a large portion of the course materials including lecture notes, tutorial notes, and exercise keys, were uploaded to these third-party platforms by students. Students often can easily obtain the completed assignments uploaded by classmates from these platforms, possibly provided convenient aids for cheating and plagiarism.

The objective of this project is to explore the design and implementation of a simple learning resources management system that can make every downloaded file identifiable and traceable. An online file storage system will be developed for hosting and dispatching the course materials. When a file is being downloaded from the platform, an electronic tag will be added to the file to store some key information about the download activity, such as the identity of the student who is downloading the file, and the date and time of the download. If a student made unauthorized uploads of course materials to an online learning platform, it is possible to trace the origin of the files by looking up the information encrypted in the electronic tags.