Episode 60: Loretta Goff
- drbertramgallant
- May 11
- 2 min read
"The general tools are not built for learning. You have to really know what you're doing to use them. It's very easy to end up being led by them because of the way they communicate."
"If I had the magic wand, it would give everyone the time and the resources to really be able to focus on how they're teaching and how they're assessing."
In this 60th episode of The Opposite of Cheating Podcast, David sits down with Dr. Loretta Goff, Academic Integrity Education Officer at University College Cork, for a conversation about what it looks like to build an integrity culture from the ground up — and why Ireland's approach is worth paying attention to.
Loretta describes how national funding through the Higher Education Authority enabled Irish institutions to create dedicated academic integrity roles, and how UCC intentionally split theirs into two positions: one focused on policy and procedure, the other — Loretta's — strictly on education. She shares what's working at UCC, from postgraduate tutors trained as academic integrity champions who run campus pop-up stands and meme competitions, to a digital badge course for faculty, to a structured remediation pathway for students who stumble.
The conversation turns to emerging findings from UCC's student and faculty surveys, which reveal a troubling trust gap between educators and students, a growing sense among non-AI-users that they're being disadvantaged by peers who offload to AI, and a demotivation around learning itself driven by time poverty and the cost-of-living crisis.
Loretta's advice for anyone starting out? Transparency — it's free, it barely takes extra time, and it works.
You can follow Loretta on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/loretta-goff-5a51a95a/ and learn more about her at https://www.ucc.ie/en/skillscentre/about/meettheteam/.
(Disclaimer: episode quotes and summary were created using YouTube's transcript and Claude and edited by a human. Any errors are the responsibility of the human.)
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