While online learning has myriad benefits, there’s one large problem: how to prevent cheating online.
Preventing cheating in online courses is challenging for a variety of reasons, including limited supervision, technological advancements, pressures to succeed, and a lack of awareness of academic integrity policies.
There are several common reasons why learners may cheat in online courses. Learners want to do well or need to achieve a certain score to pass, so they’ll look for a backdoor solution to get the score they need. One additional pressure may be the online environment itself. It’s often hard to stay motivated when learning by yourself at a computer screen, so shortcuts seem even more tempting.
Conversely, cheating sometimes occurs because learners may not see any consequence. They may be unaware that the instructor uses anti-cheating or plagiarism-checking software to check their work. In addition, perhaps the academic integrity classroom policies are unclear. You may have assumed learners would never cheat and therefore neglected to include a clear policy for the punishment of doing so.
Tags: assessment • cheating • Course Creation • education • Quizzes