Cheating whether it occurs online or on-ground,results in the students cheating themselves out of an authentic educational experience. I it is important to clearly define the deifintion of cheating in both an onlin environment and an on-ground one.
Charlotte ,
This is a good post! I like the personal experiences that we share as well!
Shelly Crider
Joel,
They should follow through with every instance as well. I have seen a lot of breaks given to so many students! Yes, we want to teach them, but for repeat offenders......a little follow through is needed.
Shelly Crider
Cheating is cheating regardless of the learning environment and we should address it the same. I had a (mother daughter) team as students and they without hesitation shared their work and turned in identical papers on a regular basis. When I addressed it, they started changing a sentence here and there but still turned the work in. I had another student who was sharing a computer with another student/friend who was copying her work word for word and turning it in as her own. She was not aware this was going on. I later learned that the students had been doing this in prior classes but the instructors were not catching it. In these cases it was the instructors who dropped the ball. They obviously were not being diligent when grading assignments not to know they were viewing duplicate work. The online classroom is tricky in that way. As online instructors we need to be aware of the many ways a student can be dishonest so we are not subconsciously condoning these behaviors by allowing things to “slip†through the cracks.
Academic integrity and honesty is important in both the online and tradtional environement therefore each college should have a specific policy in dealing with students caught cheating.
Steve,
This is a good point! We as instructors do need to be reading each discussion post to help students with plagiarism and cheating.
Shelly Crider
I believe it is the same. Whether its a resident course or an online course, cheating is just that... cheating. Oddly enough I caught a student's attempt to cheat just recently in the online forums. Thankfully the student did not plagiarize any of his peers. In this instance the student was responsible for one initial forum post on a specific topic along with two replies to his peers on the same topic. In a peer reply he copied and pasted his original topic thus using the initial post as his reply also. In other words he recycled his own work hoping it would suffice as if the instructors aren't taking the time to read all responses word-for-word.
Alan,
I look for more and more programs to come out due to this very subject and the fact that online learning is here to stay.
Shelly Crider
Alan,
This is true. Some people love the challenge of cheating and will do anything to do so. We do want to stress that cheating in school will lead cheating on the job at some point.
Shelly Crider
Trista,
Students due tend to forget that their computer files are trackable. I have seen many dupicates of the same document.
Shelly Crider
As we use turnitin extensively I have allowed students to do over an assignment pointing out the problems of too much work being from the outside source and not enough in the vein of critical thinking. I use it as a learning experience rather than a gotcha experience.
Blatant plagiarism is a different matter. But again, with turnitin its pretty easy to catch.
Interesting way of posting this question. Some people will cheat regardless of the learning environment. Opponents to online education have used this issue as a battle cry. Normal reaction to that statement is the same as listed in the question above.
There are several ways to address cheating in an online environment:
1. turnitin and similar engines can catch most if not all writing efforts to cheat. To beat this system the student often has to work harder than to write a good paper in the first place.
2.Tests can be administered using question pools by learning objective that scrambles the test so that no two students take the same exam.
3. Writing grading components that encourage rather than exclude the use of learning materials is another way to curtail cheating.
4. Proctoring services do exist and have some limited merit. But I find it laughable that on a broad scale students will have someone else do their exams without actually taking the course. Granted exceptions exist such as the massive SAT test scams. (Oh yeah, that was on-ground wasn't it)
You raise a valid point, Mark ~ if the enrolled student manages to coerce a friend or family member into composing his/her written assignments throughout the course, the instructor would never know if the caliber of work from one assignment to the next remained the same. As an online instructor, I have raised an eyebrow when the quality of a student's discussion contributions (original posts and comments to classmates) have not matched the quality of their individual assignment submissions ~ in which case I typically find a friend or family member offering proofreading services on the latter but not the former. I would hope that (a) any person who could submit high-quality deliverables on behalf of another to pass a class or earn a degree would also have the moral fortitude to refuse, and/or (b) the threat of losing the degree and thus the tuition invested in it should such dishonesty be discovered would be enough to reject the idea.
I disagree that cheating is not a concern in the online environment but agree that cheating may also exist in the traditional environment.
We should always be concerned about students cheating ~ no matter the style of class format. Students may actually be less inclined to cheat in the online environment simply because the deliverables they submit are computer files and thus very simple to compare to all available online sources for similarity. Students in most traditional classrooms still submit hard copies of their deliverables, which makes the process of comparing their work to that of others a bit more laborious.
Even so, the concern of the instructors regarding cheating in their classrooms should be as important in the online learning environment as in the traditional classroom.
The online classroom is just a different format. Certain concerns, such as cheating, is just as relevant in the online classroom as in the ground campus setting.
John,
It is amazing how quickly you can find cheating by simply reviewing the student's previous work.
Shelly Crider
I am not sure how to define cheating in an online situation. Students are encouraged to use everything to which they have access to complete assignments. That opens up every internet site. I use a plagiarism detector built into our course structure to identify when something has just been cut and pasted from some other source.
So far I have had success finding plagiarism by just comparing comments in discussion postings to the writing submitted for assignments. If a student is a poor writer and speller but the assignments are well written, I believe plagiarism is taking place.
Janet,
I love application tests as well. It is nice to see what the students have learned as opposed to seeing them guess.
Shelly Crider
It absolutely happens and it needs to be controlled to the extent possible.
I have taught for several years and you can actually begin to see patterns in online courses just as you can in the classroom.
Test centers on college campuses deal with this problem as well - one college implemented a policy that cell phones need to be held at the desk because students were texting friends for answers.
So online is no different. The best way to combat it is to have application tests that require students to think and apply the material and include essay questions.
Sean,
We need to hone in on it being unethical in our classroom. Most classes touch on business/career ethics...this is one of the ethics that does need to be discussed.
Shelly Crider
