PREVENTING STUDENTS’ ACADEMIC DISHONESTY IN DISTANCE LEARNING

Distance learning allows students to study online at university from any location throughout the world via computer with internet access. Distance education is usually organized as follows. Students use password to access their learning materials and assignments on the university website. They send essays, labs, course papers to tutors by e-mail for checking and pass online exams. The guarantee of the identity of test takers and senders of assignments to tutors by e-mail is a big problem in distance education. Academic dishonesty of students learning online, i.e. buying course papers, essays, using third parties as test-takers, and etc. is a widespread happening both abroad and in our country. Russian online learning students are less academically dishonest than their colleagues abroad. The number of academically dishonest students is constantly increasing. The author of the article shares his experience how to identify the evidence that the work sent by e-mail was performed by third parties, but not by students themselves. The article provides an overview of means for preventing student’s academic dishonesty in e-testing. The problem of student’s academic dishonesty is more urgent for universities abroad rather than for Russian ones. The proof of this fact is the numbers of ghost writers working for academic dishonest students in Russia and abroad. These numbers can be estimated due to search engines, such as Goggle or Yandex, in which keywords requested either in Russian or in English. The tutor is to make sure that essays, labs, course papers and other things received by e-mail have no obvious signs of academic fraud, i.e. performed by the students and not by third parties. The tutor should check properties of e-mailed documents: file author, date of last modification, IP-address of a sender. Information about file author and date of last modification may be accessed with Windows Explorer file tooltip or in the file properties dialogue. IP-address of a sender may be accessed with mail user agent. A lot of publications that consider different measures against cheating of distance learning students are mostly administrative. The use of remote proctoring devices is an effective measure against cheating today. During online exams the OLP-system can put questions with additional multiple choice about student’s personal history. Online proctoring system may also use finger-print scanning and keystroke identification of a student.

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