Welcome to the University of life, can I take your order? Investigating Life Experience Degree Offerings in Diploma mills
Roe, Jasper, and Perkins, Mike (2023) Welcome to the University of life, can I take your order? Investigating Life Experience Degree Offerings in Diploma mills. International Journal for Educational Integrity, 19 (1). 19.
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Abstract
In this study, we posit a new category of products provided by diploma mills, which we term Life Experience Degree Offerings (LEDOs). LEDOs uniquely capitalise on the misuse of the principle of Accreditation of Prior Learning (APL) by granting higher education qualifications based on a resume or CV alone. Through a comparative analysis with contract cheating websites, we highlight the key features and persuasive strategies employed by 10 diploma mill websites which provide LEDOs to attract and convince potential clients. We then use corpus linguistics methods by analysing a large corpus of text quantitatively to explore the keywords these websites use to describe their products using a pre-packaged corpus analysis tool (Sketch Engine). Our findings indicate that on providers’ websites, the LEDOs are framed as a tool to achieve greater socioeconomic opportunities, and the quality and appearance of the physical diploma and accompanying documents play a key role in the LEDOs’ value proposition, while references to the acquisition of knowledge and process of learning are absent. Furthermore, LEDOs are typified by the promise of accreditation and verification services, which are the two most common keywords used in the description of LEDOs on diploma mills’ websites. Future research directions are suggested, including examining this phenomenon in non-Western cultural contexts, understanding the users and operators of LEDO websites, and assessing the prevalence of fraudulent credentials obtained from these sites.
| Item ID: | 80963 |
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| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 1833-2595 |
| Keywords: | Accreditation of prior learning, Contract cheating, Diploma mills, Higher education fraud, Illegitimate credentials, Life Experience Degree Offerings (LEDOs), Value proposition |
| Copyright Information: | © The Author(s) 2023. Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article's Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. |
| Date Deposited: | 20 Feb 2024 23:42 |
| FoR Codes: | 39 EDUCATION > 3904 Specialist studies in education > 390402 Education assessment and evaluation @ 100% |
| SEO Codes: | 28 EXPANDING KNOWLEDGE > 2801 Expanding knowledge > 280109 Expanding knowledge in education @ 100% |
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