“Integrity is not a conditional word. It doesn't blow in the wind or change with the weather. It is your inner image of yourself, and if you look in there and see a man who won't cheat, then you know he never will.” — John D. MacDonald
I don't know about you, but as a distance learning student I get really tired of the objection raised by those in classroom based higher education that one of the problems with online learning is that it's too easy to cheat. The questions are always, "How does anyone know it's you doing the work, writing those papers, taking those tests?" I always wonder how they really know that the students who come to class are who they say they are. When was the last time you heard of someone getting carded in a classroom setting to prove who they are?
The latest re-authorization of the Higher Education Act even had a provision where schools that participate in federal financial aid programs must have some sort of system to positively identify the students who are taking part in a distance learning course. Fortunately at the last second cooler heads prevailed and the requirement was watered down to near nonexistence by saying that if students had to log in to a learning management system, like Blackboard or Moodle, that fulfilled the requirement.
That's why the latest edition of the Online Journal of Distance Learning Administration is so timely. They have an important article by Donna Stuber-McEwen, Phillip Wiseley, and Susan Hoggatt called Point, Click, and Cheat: Frequency and Type of Academic Dishonesty in the Virtual Classroom. These researchers found that not only do distance learning students not cheat any more often than classroom based students, they actually cheat less often! Their explanation was that distance learning students tend to be older, more mature, and better able to recognize that a cheater's primary victim is himself or herself.
This makes perfect sense to me. Most of us aren't learning online because we want to find ourselves or decide what we want to be when we grow up or because that's what Mom and Dad expect. We're doing it because we want to get somewhere better in life, we have goals that we want to reach, and we know that with all the money we're paying to learn all this stuff, we want to get as much out of it as possible!
So these researchers have my thanks for looking into this critical issue, and providing distance learning advocates with even more ammunition against those dinosaurs who still don't get why learning online can work so well. It's always nice when research confirms what those of us in the thick of things already knew!
Next up, is your student loan made in China?
Image courtesy of Anna Duncan