Academic dishonesty and its impact on virtual education

Abstract

Academic dishonesty has been widely addressed in studies worldwide, highlighting the increase that this practice has had in regard to the educational context. The interest of the authors was to present a broader view of a real problem in higher education. The main objective of this research was to examine the incidence of academic dishonesty in virtual education from a perspective framed in the context of university education based on theoretical analysis and empirical investigation. The study was based on a predominantly qualitative mixed approach, where theoretical and empirical methods were applied, such as the analytical-synthetic in which theoretical references on the subject were analyzed, determining the main indicators that laid the conceptual bases of the investigation, the deductive -inductive that circumscribed the framework of the research and as an empirical instrument the survey with closed questions applied to 260 students of different academic levels from three universities in the coastal region of the country, which are: Santa Elena Peninsula State University, Salesian Polytechnic University of the Ecuador and the Technical University of Manabí. The results were obtained by quantifying the percentage of frequency in each of the response options for each question.