Community brainstorming begins today!

[Carie Page]

Assessment. Learning space design. Changing student and faculty practice. When polled, focus groups within the EDUCAUSE Teaching and Learning community identified their top “challenges” in teaching and learning with IT. But how does your list compare? What big issues are dominating your campus conversations and water cooler debates? What challenges would you add?

The Teaching and Learning Brainstorming survey is now live. Check out the list, mark your top choices, and then add our own. The poll will stay open until Oct. 15.

Want to share this link? Invite your colleagues to participate at: http://survey.educause.edu/eli_t&l_challenges/

[Jennie Hoffmann]

Hi everyone, I currently assist faculty in developing online courses at the University of North Texas. A few of the bigger challenges we currently face seem to involve creating courseware that avoids copyright infringement and the problem of students cheating online. The rules of copyright are so vague, it is difficult to know how to guide faculty in the materials they can use from other sources - including video, audio, and images.

Regarding cheating online, some faculty have resigned themselves to understanding that students will find a way to cheat if they want to - even though our learning mgmt system offers a few options to help hinder these cheating efforts. How infuriating for these faculty though! I'm thinking the answer lies in the format of the exam - perhaps going to the extent of creating more essay-type questions is the way to really prevent cheating. . .

[Reta Chaffee]

I recently came upon some Javascript that you can embed in quizzes that make it [almost] impossible to copy or print out online quizzes. But I agree that it is only a matter of time that students will find a way to cleverly out-smart any of the course management systems attempts to curtail cheating. In the past we had been addressing more issues of plagiarism than cheating on tests...but I know that it is most likely happening.

This issue, however, isn't unique to online courses. I would venture to guess that cheating happens in all types of courses. In supporting our online faculty, the first things I discuss when they want to incorporate quizzes is whether they are concerned about cheating or not. Most expect that the quizzes are "open-book" and most don't weight the quizzes heavily and use other means for assessing the learning.

From what I have read and heard though, I believe that it is a better approach to create unique assessment tools that would make it very difficult to cheat or "collaborate." Or perhaps you encourage collaborative learning altogether.

One of our faculty members recently did a presentation on this topic and she brought up some research that indicated that the more the online instructor is present and makes connections with the learners...the less likely they are to cheat. This supports my theory that students may be less inhibited about cheating online because they don't ever have to "face" the instructor if they are caught.