How do we stop cheating?
Good question! This is certainly a hot topic for discussion in the VET sector, with many trainers and assessors expressing concerns as to the validity of work done online by their learners. Whilst many of the same problems regarding the authenticity of a learner's work and plagiarism exist in the traditional face-to-face classroom, there is perhaps more potential for it in the "anonymous" online world.
While there are no magic answers to this question there are a number of strategies that you can employ. These include:
- Getting to know your learners and maintaining strong support through the learning program.
- Building a high level of trust and integrity through role modelling appropriate behaviours and applying adult learning principles to your online facilitation strategies.
- Use a log-in/password system.
- Make exercises challenging enough that someone who hasn't undertaken previous work in the course will have great difficulty in completing the assignment.
- Give many short assessments that are embedded in class exercises so that it would be difficult for a learner to have assistance all the time.
- Ask learners to relate the subject matter to their own experiences so their answers are personalised and difficult to replicate.
- Ask learners to submit an outline and rough draft of written assessments before the final assessment is due. By doing this you have the opportunity to see the work in progress.
- Give different questions to different learners - construct a large set of questions and have them randomly selected (i.e. a database of 100 questions with 20 randomly chosen).
- Put time limits for the online test; ensure that the test is taken in a certain amount of time.
- Have non-online assessments as part of the overall course assessment.
Finally, remember that testing should never be the only means for assessing the abilities of learners. If they are evaluated with a variety of different methods, practitioners will have the best way of ensuing that there is real learning taking place.
This content was adapted from an article originally authored by John Andrius, published in the Australian Flexible Learning Community in December 2003. The full article can be found at http://learnscope.janison.com.au/LearnScope/golearn.asp?Category=11&DocumentId=4980.