Lyn ,
"Cheat websites".....what a terrible thing to use.
Shelly Crider
Cheating is a factor of what students are asked to do. Yes, cheating is an issue in online environments and the best first step is to design assignments that limit the possibilities for cheating. Open-ended responses in essay form have the best potential for this, but intended or unitended "borrowing" of the words and ideas of others will still occur. Whether or not this is "plagiarism" depends on how we treat this as a learning opportunity, with consequences only for repeat offenders.
It is important to teach students the differences between paraphrasing, synthesizing, and quoting, as well. It is true that there is a big difference between ignorance and pre-meditated cheating.
I think some students are also intimidated by the research process. Instructors can sometimes prevent cheating by demonstrating simple research techniques, sources, and tools. Once students feel comfortable with navigating their systems and locating resources, they may be less inclined to "cut corners."
I have found that communicating and enforcing course expectations right away can help to prevent some future cheating. Leading students to multiple learning opportunities and relevant tools can also curb cheating.
I am currently in the process of changing some assignment details to limit cheating. I think that instructors who are pro-active can find new ways to address these issues.
I like to remind students that cheating can often take more time than actually doing the research. With so many tools available to monitor students, they often have to spend much time in their efforts to avoid detection.
In an online classroom, cheating is probably more of a temptation. Online instructors need to be extremely concerned with cheating. That being said, instructors need to be diligent and also discern between outright dishonesty and not understanding how to properly cite references. I tend to think that more emphasis needs to placed on APA formatting in the online classroom.
Cheating should always be a serious issue. No matter the type of learning environment, you must hold the highest standards of integrity and credibility. Students rely on learning institutions to lead them and guide them to a level of higher learning that they can then rely upon in order to profesionally and academically grow. Cheating has no place in this type of environment and should never be tolerated. With that, learning institutions must set the standard of learning excellence and push for a higher level of learning.
Martin,
Open-ended questions are excellent. When students go to job interviews, that is what is expected of them!
Shelly Crider
Tylana,
Excellent! To be visual to the students right from the start is a must!
Shelly Crider
Tylana,
Updating your class each and every quarter will stop students from sharing, at least a little!
Shelly Crider
laura,
It does seem that Google can be quite the temptation!
Shelly Crider
Dwayne,
Not just a learning environment, but in the workplace as well.
Shelly Crider
Colleges and universities across the country are increasing their offerings of online courses as students and the general public demand greater access to higher education. One problem inherent in online education is the greater opportunity to cheat on quizzes, papers, and discussions. When students are not in the classroom, but on the other end of the Internet, they cannot be directly observed or monitored. This creates problems for students and professors as they struggle with maintaining the integrity of the course and seeking to ensure that all students do their own work and learn the selected material.
Cheating does occur in online environments. It is easy for a student to go to a site, like Student of Fortune, and buy an entire class worth of assignments, including the final project. We as instructors need to be aware of this occurence and try to change up the assignments as best we can each time we teach the course, so students have more difficulty cheating. Cheating with YahooAnswers can be done via a smartphone in a traditional class, as well as online. The question for me about cheating has always been, rather than take the time to find a pre-made answer that may or may not be right, why not do it yourself?
Hi Shelly,
I disagree. It is unethical for a student to receive credit for an assignment that they did not complete. Each situation should be addressed and reported to the institution.
Best,
Kelly
Cheating is cheating. We are giving students the necessary skills to succeed in life and cheating should not be one of them. Students who are caught cheating should be penalized.
Cheating in an online environment is much easier as students have access to an almost limitless source of information on the web. There are numerous sites that support student cheating and offer free resources, papers, answers etc. In the world of design, it is extremely easy for students to steal other people's work and call it their own. Instructors must be extremely vigilant of all incoming assignments and checking anything that appears questionable. There are numerous helpful tools such as "Turnitin" for academic integrity or sites like tineye.com for checking image similarity with millions of images online. Reviewing process work on an ongoing basis can often resolve much of the cheating issue as you watch a project evolve from the beginning to insure that the end product does belong to the student.
Shari,
I do not really understand why you would want to cheat yourself, but I do know it happens!
Shelly Crider
Kelly,
Each situation could be a bit different as well so each situation does need to be addressed.
Shelly Crider
We should always be concerned about cheating and academic integrity. Most online universities have great tools to help detect if documents and postings have information that is "copy and pasted" from the web and from other peoples work. It is concerning that there are websites where people have created assignment answers and papers to questions that are commonly used at online university. Instructors needs to keep an eye on the students work to ensure academic integrity.
