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Cheating for Credit

cheating

… or at least that’s the premise of the course “Understanding Cheating in Online Courses.” The course, taught by Bernard Bull at Concordia University Wisconsin, is the result of Professor Bull’s ongoing interest in online plaigiarism:

For two years he conducted research on cheating, focusing not on those who get caught but those who get away with it. At the end of his study, he found his views on cheating had begun to shift. It wasn’t as black and white as he originally thought. Were some courses designed in a way for which cheating seemed the best option? Could professors do more to not just detect cheating but help create an environment where it doesn’t happen in the first place?

I love this approach; it reminds me of how the FBI first captured Frank Abagnale, Jr., a formidable check forger and con artist, and then hired him to work in the Fraud division.

Ethical behavior remains a sore spot as teaching migrates online, as well as expanded pedagogies that include strategies such as take home exams and collaborative test-taking, and ignorance (feigned or otherwise) of the difference between working together and copying each others’ work.  Ignoring the problem or hectoring students for their bad behavior misses the structural affordances that allow it to thrive.

 

(All) content is king

I happened across this chapter, “The Changing Nature of E-Learning Content,” in a book called New Frontiers of Educational Research published by Springer earlier this year.  It is so refreshing to take a step back from the delivery systems of digitized educational content — MOOCs, of course, but also apps, blended/hybrid learning instruction, and enhanced textbooks, to name a few — and dig into how what we even consider educational content is, in fact, changing:

Fifteen years later, in 2011, digital world is brimming with content, including increasing quantities user-generated content, mobile content, and dynamically changing content such as social media, news sites, and online games. Studies show that E-learning is to somewhat behind the curve in adopting new forms of content but it is nonetheless clear that the next generation of E-learning content will be more dynamic, context aware, immersive and mobile. A new set of standards and formats will be relevant and, at least in the short run, different and more technical skills will be required to produce it. More importantly, perhaps, E-learning content is experiencing a shift in underlying pedagogical theories from cognitive, instructive, and behaviorist to social, constructivist and connectivist. In these theories, it is context that is king.

We do not want our students to go the way of the print journalist.  They need to be flexible, nimble, adaptable and able to react quickly to environmental changes.  It is nice that the nature of our world –  where truth is often a matter of cobbling together evolving information, narratives, data, etc. — is finally being duly acknowledged.

Idle thought: perhaps newspapers aren’t going out of business because journalism is dead or because the business model isn’t there, but because to print something on paper is to commit to it, and print just can’t keep up with a world brimming over with a constant barrage of information to process (or ignore). Newspapers would have to publish multiple times a day to approach any semblance of relevance today.

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