Preventing Visual Plagiarism in Design Programs in Higher Education Institutions: The Case of Ahlia University

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Recently, the persistent problem in art and design programs in Worldwide universities are visual plagiarism. The main core values of academic institutions in general and Ahlia University is to produce graduates with not only good knowledge but also good values and high academic reputation that encourages intellectual and moral development promoting the image of their universities. Therefore, Ahlia university invests its efforts to create policies and procedures for text-based assignments to control originality of students’ work while handing in assignments, reports, research proposals, and dissertations by using software technology like Turnitin. Conversely, little has been done focused on non-textual materials in art and design education. Besides, there are a plethora of articles when searching the Scopus database, about text-based academic misconduct with a dearth of research devoted to visual plagiarism which often left to the experience of academic faculty. Therefore, the main purpose of this research is to shed light on students’ understanding of visual plagiarism issues and bridge the gap in visual work. Moreover, this research will develop a pedagogical policy that can be used by faculty to control academic dishonesty in visual arts. This research is conducting using two main methods. Firstly, it depended on reviewing different literature from journals, articles, and policies from different universities about plagiarism. Secondly, this research used qualitative and quantitative data. To collect qualitative data, an in-depth interview with the 15 academicians was conducted to triangulate with the students’ findings of reasons of visual plagiarism and prevention solutions. For the quantitative data, an online survey using the Google form survey was used to a sample of 54 students in the design program at Ahlia University and other universities in Bahrain. Finally, this research reveals that the lack of awareness among students in arts and design education about academic integrity leads to visual plagiarism.