Online Education: Who goes there?

Remember the old 1993 New Yorker cartoon about how your identity on the Internet could be hidden? One dog says to another, "On the Internet, nobody knows you're a dog."

The Mercury-News carries an article about a revelation that came out as a byproduct of the admissions scandal of payments for substitutes to take online courses for students who were already admitted. See below:

...There has been conflicting research on whether students actually cheat more online than in person. Melanie N. Clay, executive director of extended learning at the University of West Georgia and editor of the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration, said: “cheating can and does occur in both traditional and online environments.”

“There is no perfect system,” Clay said.

Jason M. Ruckert, vice chancellor and chief digital learning officer at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Florida, said in some ways, technology gives online courses an edge in defeating cheaters. Software can track locations where students log in, learn to recognize a student’s keystroke patterns and check for plagiarism by scanning other  published reports.

“I believe identifying a student cheating in an online classroom might be easier than doing so in a large face-to-face course,” Ruckert said.

UC spokesman Andrew Gordon said that the system checks “VPN addresses” of its students enrolled online “to ensure that the individuals submitting assignments and taking exams are the students who are enrolled.”
But Newton said those measures aren’t always employed and don’t always work.

“There are tools that can prevent this or make it more likely you’ll get caught,” Newton said, “but if you hire somebody to take classes for you and the URL is always the same, whether it’s in Liberia or San Jose, those things won’t catch it.”

Schools and companies that make anti-cheating software for them are, Newton said, in a constant arms race with “essay mills” that sell work to students and develop workarounds.

Clay acknowledged that “a more difficult problem to detect” in either online or traditional classes is “when students pay others to write original papers for them.”

Newton said administrators are far more confident than their teachers that online cheating isn’t rampant.

“Deans and presidents will tell you cheating just doesn’t happen and their standards are rigorous and that’s just nonsense,” Newton said. “The professors I speak to will tell you, ‘Yeah it’s fairly common.'”

But as with the admissions system, schools tend to rely on the honor system and the threat that cheaters will face serious consequences. Arizona State would only say about the latest case that it “investigates all allegations of academic dishonesty that it receives.”

The most effective measures to defeat cheaters, Newton said, are having incentives for teachers to catch cheaters, severely punishing those who are caught, regularly updating anti-cheating software and using video to establish a personal recognition between the teacher and student. But he added that universities see online classes as cash cows and aren’t motivated to employ costly measures to counter cheating.

“We don’t even have a comprehensive sense of how broad the problem is,” Newton said. “I think they’re just afraid of the answer because they don’t have a good solution.”

Full story at https://www.mercurynews.com/2019/12/15/theres-a-new-front-in-the-college-cheating-scandal-online-classes/