Blog2: Academic Honesty Concerns

Through this class, I am becoming more convinced that online education, if done well, is not necessarily inferior to a face to face class. However, the anonymity of the internet still plagues me as a potential problem for academic honesty. I worry regularly in my face to face classes about plagiarism, and implement strategies to avoid it such as modifying paper prompts so they are not easily copied and pasted from a source. I can imagine many such similar strategies for an online class. Obviously I want to avoid any quizzes of facts—information that can be quickly provided by a google search instead of reading the assignment—and ask questions instead of synthesis and analysis. In an online class, though, there is the additional question of who is completing the work. I cannot physically see the student in class, hear their voice, and get to know their tone in order to compare it to their writing. I’ve caught plagiarism in the past because the writing simply didn’t sound like that student’s. 

I know this seems like an awfully suspicious attitude, and perhaps the solution is simply a certain amount of trust that people are in general honest. Then I read articles, though, about people like the “Shadow Scholar” who custom write essays for money, and I wonder if the same type of person doesn’t exist for completing online classes. Is there any way to know that the students enrolled in the class are the ones gaining the knowledge they seem to be? Or is this uncertainty something I just have to accept?