Coursera Launches AI Plagiarism Detector

Inside Higher Ed

Lauren Coffey

June 12, 2024

Coursera will offer a slate of generative AI tools in the coming months, including features that bring the online course provider into the contentious world of detecting whether students have used artificial intelligence in their work.

Coursera president and CEO Jeff Maggioncalda told Inside Higher Ed that the new expansion will focus on academic integrity and grading features.

“AI is becoming capable enough to start doing things that we would always do at the highest levels of quality, but you want it to be scalable,” he said. “This is a new way of doing things, but it’s not a new approach.”

The new tools will build on the Coursera for Campus suite of offerings launched in late 2019, the company announced Tuesday.

Coursera did not provide a timeline for the rollout beyond “coming months,” but noted it has been conducting several pilot projects with the new AI tools across the globe, including at Van Lang University and FPT University in Vietnam and at Alliance University and Woxsen University in India.

The announcement comes on the heels of several contentious conversations in academia in the last year about the efficacy and ethics of using AI tools to detect plagiarism.

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