Preventing Dishonesty in the Online Classroom | edcetera - Rafter ...

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The online education industry has seen temendous growth over the last several years, and nearly one of out three college students now takes at least one internet-based course. Unfortunately, impersonal lectures and lowered accountability make cheating even easier and more prevalent in the cloud than in brick-and-mortar classes.

This phenomenon spells trouble for students and administrators alike. Sky-high tuition at traditional universities? makes online schooling marketable and cost-effective, but employers want assurance that their workers actually earned their degrees. To increase the credibility of online programs, innovative teachers and ed tech companies have come up with a variety of ways to keep students honest.

Cheat-Proof Exams

Preventing faceless students from cheating may be the greatest difficulty for online educators. Free programs like Google Docs allow for instant collaboration during tests, and it?s nearly impossible to enforce closed-note policies. Some teachers reduce these risks by randomizing their questions and the orders in which they appear. In fact, McGraw Hill has even created a Question Pooling system for automating this process.

Others are taking a far more aggressive approach. The Proctor U program connects students with proctors via webcam, and administrators can also view each test-taker?s screen in real time. Similarly, the Respondus Lockdown Browser faciliates secure testing for Blackboard, Moodle, and a variety of other distance learning platforms. It restricts users from accessing web browsers, text documents, and other tools they might use to cheat.

Preventing Plagiarism

Most plagiarism prevention strategies work equally well for online and in-person classes. One of the most popular programs is TurnItIn, a grading platform with a built-in database of billions of web pages, publications, and previously-turned-in papers. It?s also available as a plugin for most digital classrooms, allowing online teachers to instantly check homework and in-class exercises.

Still, unscrupulous students with extra money can do more than lift previously-published prose. There are thousands of companies and freelancers who write original essays for cash, and until recently, detecting their work was nearly impossible. John Fontaine, a senior director at Blackboard, is devising a system that creates a ?fingerprint? based on a few samples of a student?s written work. If later essays contain odd word choice or diction, they?re red-flagged for further investigation.

Identity Verification

Teachers need to know that the people ?attending? their online classes are who they say they are. Just as students can pay third parties to complete their homework and compose their essays, many have hired stand-ins for tests and participatory exercises.

Similar to Fontaine?s fingerprinting system, Anant Agarwal of MIT?s Open Learning Enterprise is trying to circumvent this kind of fraud with typing style profiles. Day-to-day inconsistencies in sentence structure, response length, and backspacing habits often indicate that different people are posing as the same student. Combined with webcam verification or face-recognition software, this measure may drastically reduce test fraud.

Biometric Signature ID has also created a program which monitors anomalies in signatures, hand gestures, and stylus movements. It also monitors the IP addresses, dates, and log-in times for visitors, effectively preventing online students from hiring out-of-state test-takers. EduKan, a conglomerate of Kansas colleges, became the first group of educators to adopt the program last May.

Rethinking Assessments

Ultimately, the online environment may require a departure from traditional testing methods. Most facts are available for free, and many teachers recognize the importance of digital literacy in the twenty-first century workplace. In fact, some teachers find that requiring internet searches during timed exams encourages students to become ?net smart.? Questions that emphasize analysis over regurgitation require in-depth learning,? and they may actually make it more difficult to cheat. Overall, educators who want to add value to their programs would do well to take advantage of the internet?s facilitation of fact-finding, collaboration, problem-solving.

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