As technology improves and more online courses are offered, curriculums should be adapted to new platforms to prevent cheating.

By changing the way online courses are conducted, it would also eliminate the stigma that these classes are less important than traditional ones, which may reduce cheating in online courses.

Faculty members at a March 19 University Senate meeting discussed how Syracuse University could maintain academic integrity  in online courses as they continue to increase in popularity. Some of the main concerns members brought up at the meeting involved online courses being easier to cheat in because of a lack of supervision and perceived value compared to a traditional course.

While SU’s administration will have a difficult time eliminating cheating completely from online courses, there are several ways to adjust courses so that cheating can be reduced. Some online course curriculums are similar to their traditional counterparts, with tests and multiple-choice-format assignments. Online courses should be tailored to the online environment to allow students to get the most out of the class and to prevent cheating.

Exams posted online for students to take are very susceptible to cheating because of the way the questions can be answered. Students can work together on tests, or send answers to each other. To prevent that, online courses should be less exam-focused with more emphasis on essays and assignments with open-ended questions.

With open-ended questions and essay assignments, it becomes easier to identify cheating, as finding plagiarism in writing is easier than determining if students cheated on a multiple choice test.

Professors of these courses can also require that assignments be presented orally or using video, which are platforms that cannot be easily copied by other students or done by another person. Not only are these alternative assignments difficult to cheat on, but they also engage with students.

One of the issues regarding why cheating is so prevalent in online courses is because students feel that they can justify activities that they would not justify in a traditional classroom setting. By creating more engaging and interactive material in the course curriculum, it would help eliminate the stigma that online classes are less valuable or important.

Curriculums need to advance as education moves onto a digital platform. A traditional curriculum will not work for online courses, and is susceptible to many forms of cheating. By changing their methods, professors will have fewer cheaters to worry about.

Published on April 10, 2014 at 1:21 am