I’m attending an online class taught through Sloan-C on Academic Integrity in online classes.
I’m learning a great deal, and thought I’d pass on a couple of items.
One is that even those using online discussion boards should take care to change assignments every semester. According to Melissa Ott, who wrote this article:Seven Strategies for Plagiarism-proofing Discussion Threads in Online Courses http://jolt.merlot.org/vol5no2/olt_0609.pdf, there are websites where students can purchase answers to discussion board questions, e.g. www.studentoffortune.com . The site calls them tutorials, but students can get answers there.
A second, which I knew already, was to be sure to either use huge test banks or value objective questions as a relatively small percentage of a student’s overall grade in an online course.
A third is to introduce academic integrity into an online course through a letter to students. I think I’ll do that for face to face and online courses.
