Cheating in an online class
Because you don't "see" students completing their work in an online class, how can you be sure they aren't having someone else do the work for them? What can you do to prevent cheating from happening in your online class?
Natalie,
I understand. Many instructors find attendance in the live chats to be relatively a relatively low percentage of the students enrolled in the class. Some data suggests it is because the students primary reason for taking online classes may be the asynchronous characteristic. Flexibility in scheduling and not having to meet at a particular time appeals to a great many of the online students. Many of us continue to seek ways to increase the chat attendance. Hang in there and let us know if you or your colleagues from across anything that is especially successful. Thank you for sharing.
Dr. S. David Vaillancourt
Yes, I actually have a lot of flexibility to do this. I ask the students on day 1 if the schedule I set is conducive to their being able to attend, and based on their feedback, I do make some changes. I have spoken to my colleagues and attendance for the live chats, regardless of the class topic, is low all around.
Natalie,
Is there a possibility of changing the date and/or time of your chats to eliminate the conflict with the ground campus schedule?
Dr. S. David Vaillancourt
I actually don't have a huge turnout to my live chats because many students have ground classes on campus the same night. Therefore, I can't compare their comments/writing style in the chat to their comments/writing style from their assignments. I do have several students who email me, though, and even though email is written much more casually than a formal assignment, I still use it as my marker to check for correct grammar usage, spelling, proper set up, etc.
Hi John, we are finding that learners can be very clever when they cheat. Some learners take a sentence or two from several learner's discussion compositions and create their own. Other learners are sharing their discussions from other sections or previous courses and some are selling them to papermills! We created a tool that matches discussion posts, so we have been able to catch many learners copying discussion posts. Tina
I am a relatively new online professor and have thought about this quite a bit as I have already seen some students excel overnight and it has raised my awareness to the topic. To mitigate this, I have started to incorporate questions from discussion forums as well as from proprietary course handouts.
I actually have personal experience with the cheating issue. I had 2 students submit the exact same responses to 2 hypothetical questions. The responses were identical (word for word), but one was submitted as a Word attachment and one was submitted in the body of an email. I initially didn't catch on, but once I started reading the second paper (they were each about 1 page long), I started to recognize the language. I then compared them and discovered they were identical. I reported them and they received a zero on teh assignment. A report was placed in their permanent file and if caught again, they will be kicked out of the school.
As a side note, I was also told you can check the "properties" on a Word document and see if the document originated from a different student's computer. Another instructor was able to catch 2 students cheating when the properties of the document were from another student's computer.
That is a tricky issue. But, we have the same issue when it comes to the residential classroom and papers/assignments that are not completed in class. Bottom line is if you have a student that wants to cheat, they will find a away. What they don't realize is the only person they are hurting is themselves.
There are tools and techniques to help identify plagiarism but I don't know how you would be able to determine if the student assigned to the class was the person who completed the assignment.
Unfortunately, cheating is everywhere, not just in the online classroom. Thanks for your posting Lisa.
I don't think we can, in an online environment, know for sure who is in fact even taking the course. Is it Joe, which is suppose to be the student, or is it Joe's brother. My thoughts on cheating are-it can be challenging to stop. In the end all will come out in the wash as we say. The person will not know the topic and has lost the opportunity. It's easier to catch in the face-to-face class-but it still goes on there as well.
You bring up some great points Monique. Certainly knowing the writing styles of your students can be a great way to begin to detect cheating.
David-
I think we're getting there, but bandwidth and technology isn't quite there yet. Online graduate programs seems to be moving more quickly in that direction. I can't wait to see it implemented more consistently and for the technology to be more prevalent.
Best,
Monique Ferraro
I agree, Shenetha. One of the problems I've encountered is with the process for reporting cheating. Some universities make it so difficult and time consuming to report suspected transgressions, that it really dissuades instructors from looking very closely at suspected student academic honesty cases.
Best,
Monique Ferraro
Jessica-
I think you're absolutely right. You can discern a student's tone and style from even the briefest contributions. It is also apparent from the types and frequencies of grammatical and spelling errors.
Best,
Monique Ferraro
It's important to keep students engaged and to pay close attention to students' submissions on all accounts. If there are major differences in quality between papers versus discussion board posts and group project submissions, that's a good indicator that the student isn't doing all of his or her own work. Turnitin is a good tool, but it isn't enough to detect situations in which a student is having another person doing at least some of their work. It's extraordinarily difficult to detect occasions in which someone has another complete the entire course for him or her. Protecting against that is something that should probably take place at the university level, using appropriate security and authentication procedures and tools.
You provided some great tips on identifying cheating in the classroom. I especially like the idea of getting a writing sample to compare at the beginning of class. Thanks for sharing!
This is a question asked in on-ground classes too. We don't "see" students submit their work there either. As such, when I taught on-ground, I always took a writing sample at the beginning of the class to compare with future assignment submissions. For online detection, my school subscribes to software that shows how much of the work is original and what is not. That works well. I've also learned that comparing assignments to email correspondence from the student is much like taking the writing sample. It's amazing how much I can learn about students from their emails. At my school, we use discussion boards and I can glean information there too when looking at their formal submissions versus their responses to others.
It is still interesting information. Thanks
