"I will take your online college course for you"

With the forward match of technology, it does become easier to "outsource" academic work. I wouldn't be surprised if an entire industry of "higher education consultants" doesn't appear that scans for accredited institutions offerings online degree with no proctored examinations or residentials and offers "degree completion services" to interested students.

Checks and balances have been put in place by many institutions that attempt to minimise this type of fraud. For example, proctored examinations through approved centres and annual residentials are a good start. It is no coincidence that good universities offering "external" programs incorporate these methods.

A one or two week/year residential is a good start to discourage fraud. Proctored examinations are mandatory.

IMHO, a degree obtained completely 100% "online" is more suspect than one earned in a traditional manner or one that has residentials and proctored examinations.

 

I have also worked for both non-profit and for-profit schools. Both many institutions (both non-profit and for-profit) utilize a "master" online course (e.g. a master Psych 101) from which the individual Psych 101 sections of the course are created. This is considered a "best practice" by both distance learning experts and accrediting bodies, as it provides a greater ability to exercise quality control between sections. In cases where individual faculty create different sections of the same course (usually without the assistance of an instructional designer), the result tends to be inconsistent quality among sections of the same course. While it can be argued that inconsistent course quality is the norm for F2F courses, it need not be so in online courses.

Actually, it is just as likely that a fraudster would find willing customers at public institutions (particularly community colleges), where the lower tuition often translates into less personal investment into one's learning.

Having trained hundreds of faculty/teachers over 20 years in the use of technology and how to develop online courses, it has been my experience that many who are great in the classroom do not develop and teach online classes well (unless provided with significant training and instrucitonal design support).

Personally, I do not use graded multiple choice tests. I require a series of projects, which tie into a problem (realted with their job or career choice) that the student must solve with the individual pieces. When I use the online tests, it is for ungraded student self-assessment activities (e.g. practice with immediate feedback)

Many faculty at both for-profit and non-profit schools choose to use the "canned" courses provided by the vendors of their textbooks (such as Pearson's Course Compass). According to the vendors themselves (Pearson, Cengage, McGraw-Hill, etc.), they actually do more business with non-profit schools (who, strangely enough, also want to save money). Many insitutions (including mine) pay faculty to serve as developersor subject matter experts for new online courses. If a university offered 6 online sections of Freshman English taught by different instructors, what sense does it make to pay multiple people a development fee to develop the same course? It makes more sense to have the academic department assign one faculty member to develop the master course and have the individual sections built from that. this also makes more sense from course design quality and consistency point of view.

As far as academic freedom is concerned, the master course concept does not limit the ability of the faculty member to introduce controversial subjects or ideas without the fear of dismissal (which is what academic freedom is), nor does it prevent the faculty member from bringing in additional content into the course. Regarding fraud, there is no evidence to date that this model has resulted in greater insitances of fraud than other development models.

We use Turnitin. I works pretty well. Your point is well taken, which is why we counsel our faculty to vary their assignments. You can use differnent assignments to meet the same course objectives. In some classes, however, some assignments are mandated by the discipline's career expectations, accrediting bodies, professional licensure, etc. Composing a business plan, for example, is a mandated part of many of our business courses.

Proctored exams are certainly an option, but they can be difficult, time consuming and expensive for large programs with many students. Personally, I think that using new technologies to preserve outmoded practices (such as "scantron"-type multiple guess tests) is wasteful. It is time that we develop better, more accurate and relevant ways to assess learning.

 

The U.S. Higher Education Act requires accrediting agencies to verify that institutions that they accredit have a system in place to verify online student identity. Currently, learning management systems with a secure username and password satisfy this requirement. However, there is an new industry of verification products by Axciom, Kryterion, Remote Proctor, ProctorU, etc., that use a variety of authentication methods. These include personal questions, keyboarding profiles, and various types of biometric scanning (e.g. matching your face to your photograph, fingerprint scanning, retina scanning) and live proctoring using a webcam. It will be interesting to see what the next wave of regulations bring.

 

Dr. Pina, I would like to thank you for this information, and if it is not a problem for you, could you perhaps elaborate on the concept of the "master" online course? I presume it consists of things such as course outline, core lectures, suggested textbooks etc?

 

Glad to...When we have a new online course, the Dean or Dept. Chair assigns a faculty subject matter expert who works with one of my instructional designers to create the master course in our LMS (Angel). The master course consists of:

--the course objectives (what skills and knowledge the student is expected to gain)
--the instructional materials (lessons) and assignments (to allow them to reach the objectives)
--the assessment activities (how to determine whether students have met the objectives)
--the syllabi (textbook, general class policies, grading policies, department & university policies, etc.)
--the structure (usually a folder for each week)
--setup of the grade book

The master course content stays on the system. A few weeks before each quarter, the content from a master course is copied into each individual section. Instructors are not supposed to alter the exisiting objectives and assignments/assessments, but they are free to add additional content, set up discussion forums and personalize the course, post announcements, intercact with students, provide feedback, etc.

Only the content from the master course is retained and copied into the next quarter sections, so any additional content would have to be added to the master (with the permission of the original faculty subject matter expert). We ask faculty who add any addition content to their section courses to be sure that they retain that content on their systems, so they can upload it the next time they teach the course.

 

That is fascinating stuff, especially the fingerprint and retina scanning. Fingerprint scanning is within currently accessible technology. It seems to me that technology would take care of some of the issues, at least with fraudulent test-taking. Proving authorship of research papers would be more problematic. In fact, I can't think of any way to insure authenticity of those. Oral defense is all that comes to mind, but that would only be applicable for a dissertation. Any other ideas?

 

How about a fingerprint scan tied to a proprietary word processor to battle research paper fraud? Possibly a word processor that is only available online in the student's portion of the online classroom. You wouldn't be allowed to type information into the word processor unless your fingerprint scan checks out. Fingerprint scanners shouldn't be too expensive, they are basically a form of digital camera. If they are prohibitively expensive, one could be developed specifically for this purpose without too much trouble. The university could manage the database of fingerprints. You would have to go to a company like "Live Scan" (had to do it for my credential) to record a verified fingerprint. That all seems quite "doable" to me. Am I missing something?

 

I guess there is no ultimate "justice" in Academia. I'm not that sure how the undergraduate executive, who bounces of some ideas to an assistant to write his paper differs from some Professor, who lets his doctoral students write his book chapters or is surprisingly the co-author of all the 20-30 journal articles his department publishes a year.

 

Interesting perspective. I have some personal experience with this. Many years ago, I was one of several grad students who worked for a certain professor. I authored a $50,000 grant proposal that was funded--my name was removed from the proposal when it was sent in. I also authored a proposal to present at a professional conference that was accepted. Again, my name did not appear and I was not invited to co-present with the illustrious professor. I was also part of a team of doctoral students that wrote a lengthy monograph to document a large national evaluation project undertaken by our team. The professor put his name on the cover and we were relegated to a single brief mention for our assistance in the acknolwedgements page. In each case, the professor was not involved at all in the production or witing of these items--he was just the "boss" who took credit for them and added them to his vita.

At a different department in the same university, my professors routinely engaged in research, publishing and presenting with students. Their procedure was clear: All authors were credited and the placement of each author was according to the amount of work done on the project. If the professor did 49% of the work and the student did 51%, the student was listed as the first author. These professors were fine being 3rd or 4th author on a journal article or conference presentation. The professor in the paragraph above would never have considered such a thing.

I have taken the example from my professors--not the one for whom I worked. It doesn't matter that I am the Dean--if my Assistant Dean, one of my Instructional Designers, faculty or a student writes the largest part of the article or presentation, they get "first billing". I would NEVER consider putting my name on an article, etc. in place of the real author's name. I do not care if that it considered "acceptable practice"--it isn't for me.

 

Proctored exams or not, canned courses or not, if you can afford to pay someone to cheat for you, it is going to happen whether it's online or B&M.

 

I agree with this more or less. I think of as being a bit like locking the doors of your car. A car door lock, even a really good one, isn't going to stop a determined thief. Similarly, a proctored exam isn't going to stop a determined cheater.

 

Why not use Prometric or Phompson type of system?

Just like with Certifications, Someone always checks your ID etc.

 

How do I contact you

Please contact me, I would like this service..

 

LOL, wow. A few years back I advertised tutoring services for extra cash, and I had a lot of people interpret that to mean I would "do" their work for them and contacted me regarding specific assignments. What I don't understand is how you would trust someone to do your class for you? So, let me get this straight- I hire you to do my class for me, and if you get crappy grades and I flunk,then what? Now I've paid tuition AND someone to flunk for me? DWB must be rich

 

Jennifer - Just get the money up front and you'll do OK.:sgrin: