EFFECTIVE PREVENTIVE MEASURES FOR USING GHOSTWRITERS SERVICES BY DISTANCE LEARNING STUDENTS

Distance learning allows students to study online at university from any location throughout the world via computer with internet access. The main advantage of distance education is that students do not attend classes every day; they study at home according to their own schedules. It is especially important for the persons who work. Academic cheating is widely practiced among online students. To cheat online is rather easy because there is no face-to-face contact with the educator. There is a large market of ghostwriters in Russia and other countries for the overworked or lazy students. Online custom writing services offer to complete assignments, take online exams, or take an entire course on behalf of the payer. The purpose of this paper is to present an overview of effective preventive measures against ghostwriters in distance education. The author used his own experience and summarized information from the appropriate sources to write this paper. Online assessment should be arranged in a way that ensures that a student and not a ghostwriter passes exams or submits assignments. Control of assignments. The authorship of a ghostwriter maybe revealed if a tutor would check properties of e-mailed documents: file author, date of last modification, IP-address of a sender etс. However, the best way is to organise frequent and regular visual contacts trough Internet of a tutor and a student. It is of no use to ask students something via e-mail if ghostwriters maybe took an entire course. Control of online exams. Some universities organize exams for distance-learning students in specific examination centres or in campuses. Physical proctoring is reliable and it does reduce cheating. However, distance-learning students had to go to some distant place. Online proctoring, synchronous or asynchronous, is more fit to such students. There are online proctoring providers in Russia and abroad working for universities. Synchronous online proctors watch via web-camera and microphone watch and listen for any suspicious movements and sounds from the examinee. Synchronous online proctoring is more reliable than physical proctoring, proctors can detect any cheating. Asynchronous online proctoring is based on automated proctoring software. It uses web-cameras and microphones for continuous identity verification of online test-taker. It is less reliable because the software is not able to deal with the blind zones of veb-cameras. Effective preventive measures against gostwriters in distance education are frequent and regular visual contacts trough Internet of a tutor and a student concerning assignments, physical or synchronous online proctoring of online test-takers.

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