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A Problem for College in the Fall: Reluctant Professors - NY Times

7/3/2020

Thank you to the MOBTS (Management and Organizational Behavior Teaching Society - https://mobts.org/) team - and to the many presenters - for organizing a week that was both enlightening and exhausting. I learned so much about teaching through the selfless sharing of the presenters and the other participants. This conference represented a community of practice.

My focus during the workshops was on developing the most effective possible teaching methods for fully online classes. My fall courses all will be online. My students deserve an effective "educative" experience, to use one of Dewey's terms. We lose much of the social aspect of learning, at least the face-to-face aspect, with fully online courses. I received wonderful ideas from the MOBTS conference that will guide me toward delivering a psychologically safe and rich educative experience this fall.

This NY Times article illustrates a concern I have for the fall. Some professors may refuse to teach in classrooms. They will clash with university policies requiring seated classes. On many campuses, I suspect that the start of the fall semester will be chaotic. I am better prepared now than I was a week ago. Thank you MOBTS.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/us/coronavirus-college-professors.html

#highereducation #covid19 #sociallearning #health #mobts

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More about Academic Integrity in Our Changed World

6/15/2020

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Please take two minutes to read the article at this link from a Singapore newspaper:

"NUS students get zero marks for cheating on take-home exam"

As students take more college courses online, either fully or in a hybrid seated+online configuration, getting the students to maintain academic integrity increases dramatically. It simply is too easy for a student to cheat if they are taking an exam or writing a paper online with no oversight -- i.e., without proctoring. Why does this matter to me? Two simple reasons:

Students who study to learn the material feel cheated by students who collaborate or plagiarize on exams.

Some students -- think nurses, accountants, engineers, doctors, and other professional practitioners -- will be expected to have actually learned what they studied when they start to practice medicine, design buildings and bridges, or handle corporate and personal accounts.
In a recent year, partway through a semester in a capstone strategic management course I taught in Singapore, I was talking with my students about academic integrity. One student raised his hand and I called on him. He said, and this is a verbatim quote: "Professor, it isn't cheating if you don't get caught." This actually happened!

After discovering that exam scores were significantly higher -- i.e., 20% or more higher -- with online multiple-choice question (MCQ) exams, I did an experiment in one of these capstone courses. I put a low-stakes MCQ exam online, scheduling it to be open for 30 minutes during a regular seated class session. The exam was intended to be taken independently, not collaboratively. The students had ten minutes to complete the exam during the 30-minute window. They started in the classroom, and then could go wherever they wanted to complete the exam during that 30-minute window.

I gave the students a countdown to the start of the exam, and the second the exam window opened, about 75% of the students ran out of the classroom to the tables in the hallways to form groups to take the exam together. The remaining 25% of the students stayed in the classroom. I had told everyone that they should take the exam the way the normally would, so they did. One group at a large table had a single student take the exam during the first 10-minute block and watched that student, advising him if he was unsure of the answer. When he finished they regrouped into three smaller groups and then watched and advised the one student in their smaller group has he or she took the exam. Finally, the remaining students went to their computers to take the exam in the last 10-minute block, with the students who had completed the exam watching and helping.

I knew this behavior existed from a few years back, when I discovered extremely high scores on a Masters-level online exam that -- are you ready for this -- nursing students were taking. Eventually, one of the students in the class complained. To her -- she had studied hard for the exam and had taken it by herself as instructed -- it was unfair that other students had high grades without actually learning the material. She had observed students in her class taking the exam in teams at computers in the library.

Many of my friends feel it is unfair to use plagiarism checking tools, or online exam monitoring tools. We would proctor the exam in the classroom. Why should we not proctor it online? And how do we treat the students who learn the material who feel cheated by the students who do not learn but plagiarize or get help during online exams?

Of course, we could stop giving MCQ exams. But students can cheat in online essays or open-ended question exams just as easily. I use the MCQ exams only to confirm that the students are reading and understanding the course material. I even give the students the subject of every question on the exam a week ahead. These exams account for a relatively small portion of the final grade. If I catch a student cheating on one of these, the student most likely will fail the course. But I need the monitoring tools for online exams to catch the cheating. (And yes, I use question pools and random question delivery to limit cheating. I've had a student answer a write-in question that wasn't on his delivered online exam because someone else had told him the question that the other student had received and this student gave the answer to that question.)

I use Project-Based-Learning methods with students working together all semester in teams. We could just give team-based grades. But if you teach, you know there are a lot of social loafers who expect the other team members to do the work, but expect the same grades as their team members.

I hate online exam monitoring. We must use it; out of fairness to students who try to learn the material, and because students will be expected to know what we teach when they start their careers.

This article, about online cheating in an Engineering program at the National University of Singapore (NUS), illustrates the problem. Congratulations to NUS both for giving the students zero grades, and noted their academic integrity failure in their permanent records. If we sanction students for cheating, and have ways to identify cheating, we may be able to reduce the "It isn't cheating if you don't get caught" mentality.

#college #highereducation #academicintegrity #integrity #honesty #onlineeducation #onlineexam

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Academic Integrity in the New Online World

4/27/2020

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Image source - https://gateway.iupui.edu/Communities%20of%20Practice/Academic%20Integrity.html

"A 2017 study by Kessler International reported that 76 percent of surveyed students said they had copied text from someone else’s assignments. Slightly more (79 percent) admitted to plagiarism from internet sources. Around 72 percent said they’d used mobile devices to cheat.

"An astonishing 42 percent of students admit to purchasing custom papers or essays online, and 28 percent have paid someone to do their online work. Sadly, many of them thought it was ok to cheat" (Source https://www.pearsoned.com/deterring-cheating-online-course/).

The move to online education has forced many instructors to face the problem cheating by students in online courses. I've dealt with this since 2014, when I first taught courses online. Without help from the IT department in for form of academic integrity insurance programs, managing student integrity is severely challenging.

Plagiarism checking applications help. I use them when available, such as SafeAssign in Blackboard, which some of my schools provide through their Learning Management System (LMS). I let the students see the percentage of content matched by SafeAssign (also, TurnItIn, provided in some other systems), and I let them resubmit their paper. Students who discover a high percentage of matches often rewrite their papers without the plagiarized content and resubmit. The result is that after the first round of paper submissions, the students do original work at the outset of new papers.

Question pools help when they can deliver random sets of questions to each student. For example, in Blackboard, I can create a question pool of 50 questions for a 10-question text. Students each get a randomly selected set of 10 questions, in random order, and with the answer sequences (e.g., A, B, C, D) randomized. This helps discourage students from using a screen recording application so that they can share the exam with other students, as each student gets a different exam.

The best tools I've used are LockDown Browser with Respondus Monitor. The student cannot browse away from the exam, and the monitor application records the video and audio of the student's setting, actually halting the exam if the students full face exits the camera's view, for example. This however requires that students have the necessary equipment, and must be arranged before a course starts. Otherwise, some students will be disadvantaged. This is a highly intrusive tool set, but having used it the first time this semester, I have found that the students accept the situation. It really is no different than if they were taking the exam in a classroom with my proctoring from the front of the room.

The Pearson article helps provide perspective and is worth a quick read.

#highereducation #college #onlineteaching #teachers #onlinecourses #academicintegrity #cheating #plagiarism

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