The Cheatability Factor (2009)

Editor's Notes

• #3: Problem: cheating, spec. in online environnments, whether REAL or PERCIEVED For: faculty, instructional designers, administrators who only care when cheating is reported We’ll consider both approaches to dealing with cheating: “search and destroy” (seek cheating, use technology to expose, and punish), and “hearts and minds” (convince students of the value of real learning, the pointlessness/detractions of cheating, and foster a community [fuuuzzzzy] of ethical scholarship [gag]) Tackle the question of how we deal with cheating in online learning environments We can learn something about perceptions and realities of online cheating by looking at emerging “solutions.”
• #12: Give and ask for difficult cheating examples or scenarios How you define cheating may vary depending on your role and your teaching philosophy. Does technology and this shifting internet culture change how we define cheating? Does it change how students define cheating? “ I copied this from Wikipedia, so it’s not plagiarism.” “ I wrote this in Wikipedia before I turned it in.” “ Because it was online I thought it was open-book.” “ I posted it to my Web site so I guess some one could have copied it.” “ I thought you wanted us to collaborate.” Your answer WILL affect how you interpret the information in the rest of the presentation.
• #13: JARED How prevalent do you think it is? This is a difficult question, because it requires us to either DETECT or get students to ADMIT. If we could detect with reliability, accuracy, and ease you wouldn’t be sitting here So how prevlent is cheating, in any environment?
• #14: Surprisingly, When polled most faculty say it is not a significant problem. But nobody wants to be the chump who concedes that students cheat in his/her class! Dick, M., Sheard, J., Bareiss, C., Carter, J., Joyce, D., Harding, T., & Laxer, C. (2003, June). Addressing student cheating: definitions and solutions. ACM SIGCSE Bulletin, 35(2), 172-184. Would you admit to cheating? Survey data of students show as many as 75% of students cheat at least once during their academic career. We don’t know if this is habitual or isolated. If habitual: are students less ethical (one survey shows faculty think so), is school just too hard, are the classes poorly designed, is cheating too easy to do? If isolated: does that indict the course or the assessment, is it just a rare alignment Of those cheaters, 95% cheated and were not caught! That’s a lot of cheating.
• #15: Why? If habitual: are students less ethical (one survey shows faculty think so), is school just too hard, are the classes poorly designed, is cheating too easy to do? If isolated: does that indict the course or the assessment, is it just a rare alignment of the stars?
• #16: 23% of undergrads were born after Pac-Man.
• #17: Some research of cheating suggests that predeliction to cheat increases as students get older, at least as old as 25, if not 30. Remember that theory of load? Is online education attractive to non-traditional students?
• #19: JARED Give (3) reasons why it’s easier online Now give (3) reasons why it’s no easier than face-to-face Can we effectively reproduce f2f assessments online? Or does the online environment need different approaches to assessment? Some anecdotal research suggests it’s less pervasive but why? Early adopters/top-tier learners? More authentic assessments? More engaged instructors? “ So far, quality online education has demanded small class sizes and interactivity between students and teachers,” Dr. Wallace K. Pond
• #20: Who’s responsible for online cheating? Is it the instructor or students? David Wiley “If your students can cheat on you, then you deserve it” Does cheating happen in YOUR courses? How would you know? How can you determine if it is happening? Cheating is a huge topic. We could spend all day exploring ways to cheat and ways to thwart cheating. Instead we’re going to focus on things we can easily control, and we do so by trying to measure the cheatability of an online course.
• #21: Recognize these students? Neither does their instructor. How can you know if your students are cheating if you can’t identify them? But if you get to know your students online, and learn their interests, writing styles, habits, and you individualize assessments, their ability—and more importantly their DESIRE—to cheat will diminish. Personally meaningful assessments. One common idea we will return to is using individualized assessments that are personally meaningful to the students. These are powerful in so many ways. They can be authentic, relating directly to the professional world in which they operate, they are personal allowing the instructor to get to know and recognize the students. They are personally meaningful, which increases student’s motivation in succeeding for their own sake, and happens to increase retention of information in memory.
• #22: Now venn diagrams are very possible amongst educators, in fact I think the latest requirement for teaching certification in some states is to create a venn diagram. Another favorite amongst educators is the rubric, so we built our tool as an easy-to-answer, 35q rubric. Our rubric is just one tool that can help faculty measure these three area’s influence on the cheatability of an online course. All of this is the educational environment Technology = technical: Could technology capacitate/enfranchise/empower OR inhibit cheating? Examples of enabling These tools are FIRE. You have to be careful or you’ll get burned. Course Design = learning design: Static: Could the constructed educational environment capacitate/enfranchise/empower or inhibit cheating? Pedagogy = teaching (children, but remember nontraditional, adults; remember LOAD): Active: Could the pedagogical practices of the instructor capacitate/enfranchise/empower or inhibit cheating? As you can see this is very big, it affects both Technical and Design aspects. It’s the daily practice that insists that good design works or fails, that technology assists or enables.17 measurable areas
• #23: General Online exams or quizzes (proctored or unproctored) as % of total course assessments Papers or projects as % of total course assessments Participation/discussions (hard to measure, low of possibility and impact = not worth the time) I’ve talked enough, so instead of explaining all the the assessment items and criteria, Instead I’m going to walk you through the rubric. In fact, we’ll take one lucky participant through the rubric from start to finish, interrupting you to explain each item or criteria.
• #24: So, if you (1) teach an online course (2) actually know what’s in that course, and (3)are brave, willing to answer frank questions about your course design and teaching, raise your hand and volunteer.
• #25: Here’s the URL. Everyone else is welcome to complete the rubric on their own for their own online course, or if you can’t get a connection, follow along here with us. This is open and available to anyone, so feel free to take this back to your institution and give it a try. Go out to the rubric and walk through it, explaining criteria and matching it back to earlier audience responses and research.
• #26: The scale is out of 100, but let me tell you no one has yet broken 80. 100 is really the holy grail, the impenetrable online course. Don’t expect to get a 90. This is not a test. One suggestion: percentile of rubric users. How accurate is this? Does that matter? Do we care what that number means? (participants should point out that this is a process, a dialogue starter, a way to get faculty to look objectively at cheating without intimidating them. They can do this in isolation or as part of a workshop) Is whole worth more than the sum of it’s parts? future research could compare the accuracy of this to anonymous class surveys and technical detection of cheating in course. This formula is based on our research and it’s weights may be subjective. It is in not meant to be an actual, valid score.
• #27: Here’s that URL again…
• #35: If we have time, talk about how this act is NOT REALLY AN ISSUE. This is what most of us use anyway.
• #36: If broken Web site. HML Y/N