| The simple answer to the question, "How do you stop online students cheating?" is that you don't. You discard the idea of "cheating" altogether. In days not so long past, rote learning was important because, in many professions, there was no way to access the source data within a reasonable amount of time within the arena where that information would be useful. A trip to the library in the middle of the workday was generally not feasible. Pausing to locating and consulting the correct medical textbooks in the middle of an operation was dangerous and could have proven fatal to the patient. Contrast that with the current state of the world where, in the vast majority of cases, the answers to many questions and the solutions to many problems can be located within minutes or even seconds from a smartphone or tablet. Combine that with widespread wireless broadband access in the developed world and it becomes obvious that not only is rote memorization of many facts, figures, formulae, and so forth not needed, it may actually be counterproductive. I say counterproductive because, due to the way university-level education works much of what you are learning, especially in technical disciplines, is obsolete by the time you learn it. That's not a swing at formal education, mind you. I'm not asserting that what is learned at a university is not useful. I'm asserting that by the time you memorize that information it is highly likely that some other development has arisen which either invalidates or supersedes what you just recorded. What I believe would be more productive than online universities worrying about cheating would be to more aggressively time-limit their exams. Doing so would at least validate how quickly students are able to gather and synthesize information to arrive at correct conclusions - a skill set that will serve them well even in today's rapid-access-to-information world. |
That only works if you can prevent the student from simply hiring an expert to take their tests for them.