How to overcome Cheating in Online Courses

The ease of cheating in online courses varies by the institution and class, experts say.
Instructors will rattle off a number of reasons why online students should think twice about cheating: they learn less, they cheapen their documentation and in some cases, they even get caught.
Still, the note falls on deaf ears.
“A lot of people cheat in online courses,” says David Pritchard, a physics professor at MIT who has studied academic dishonesty. “There are only some people who cheat a lot.”
Online students are not more likely to violate rules than their on-campus equivalents, says Bernard Bull of Concordia University Wisconsin, who has studied cheating in online classes at two liberal arts colleges. Among those who admitted to cheating, about 40% reported doing so in online quizzes, says Bull, who serves as assistant vice president of academics. About 13% reported cheating on papers and the similar percentage admitted to bending the rules in online classes.
Some experts suggest it’s easy to cheat in online learning environments, since students will ask someone to take an exam for them or complete an exam with the Internet at their fingertips.
“Students online, depending on the college, have good opportunities to cheat right now,” says Fred Stielow, who helped prepare cheating prevention tools at American Public University System. But the bad news for cheaters, he says, is that new tools are being prepared that will make it even harder to swindle their way into a good marks.
Below are some of the present technologies instructors using to keep students in check?
Proctoring: When students take online exams in their own home, it may be hard for school officials to verify their identity. As a result, more schools are hiring companies that give online proctoring through exams. Though the use a of a webcam, employees from the company will watch a student’s face and computer screen as she or he takes the test. Before students start the online exam, they have to show their driver’s license or other identity proof. ProctorU, one such company, works with more than 500 institutions, a spokeswoman said.

In spite of using proctoring for a majority of final exams, Eric Friedman, associate director in the office of online education at Boston University, says students still try to cheat on the exams. Some students try to put their notes outside of the webcam’s view, only to have their darting eyes give them away, he says. Other students have had friends hide in the room and read those answers or have staged an Internet connection loss to look up answers.
“We’ve seen some truly creative approaches,” he says.
Plagiarism detection software: The learning management systems students use to submit their assignment increasingly come along with plagiarism detection software. One of the most effective tools, Turnitin, scans vast amounts of Web content to evaluate whether a student’s work matches existing material.
“It’s wonderful,” says Jean Marrapodi, director of eLearning at New England College of Business and Finance. In her views, most students caught by the technology are not intentionally cheating, but rather don’t understand how to properly cite their sources.
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